In the process of designing my new creation—jpiche.com—I decided to try out Drupal for content management. A number of larger companies and colleges like Popular Science, The New York Observer, AOL Corporate, and Trinity Bible College (where I work) have moved to using Drupal. So what makes it appealing? Why choose Drupal over other CMSs like WordPress or Joomla!, which I have both used before?
The two key differences between Drupal and everything else is flexibility and ease of use. I started off my web programing career doing straight HTML for everything, and it is now still stuck in my head that I need to control all my programming. An example is another website I maintain with straight HTML, Vehris.com. If I chose to use a CMS, I would have been stuck in the bounds of what the developers thought a website should be. But now with Drupal I get what I need—it is designed with freedom of design in mind. Once you download Drupal, setting it up is supremely easy and afterwards you are immediately given a website you can do as much or little with as you want. If you just want to start posting blog articles, or if you want to transition a large corporate website, you are given everything you need right away.
But, developing complex themes with Drupal is not for for the faint of heart. When working with Drupal, it seems like a key piece of documentation is missing to help you start theming. I was lucky to run across a promotional copy of chapter 8 “The Theme System” from the book Pro Drupal Development by John VanDyk & Matt Westgate. Before I found this, I was totally lost.
Overall though, I’ve truly enjoyed my experience with Drupal. I now understand why so many web developers flock to it. For anything more complicated that a blog, Drupal is almost a must for free software content management. However, I think for a simple blog, I still recommend Blogger or WordPress.