| Getting to know Drupal |
Mar. 03, 2006
You may recall that I've been working on revamping one of my Web sites with the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS). I'm finally done with the implementation and the design work and I'm well on my way into deployment, so I wanted to let you know that Drupal has ended up working extremely well for me.
It didn't start that way! First, I found that Ubuntu and Drupal were, for me anyway, not a good fit.
I then moved on to deploying a test system on SUSE 10. This went better, but along the way I found that Drupal was a bit cranky. The long and short of is that you need to make sure you have just the right versions of MySQL, PHP, and Apache lined up correctly for your version of Drupal, or you're likely to run into trouble.
With that done, though, I was quickly able to build the framework of my Web site and run up my test system structure. In case you haven't done this kind of thing before, always, always build a test site instead of tinkering with your site on the Web.
Now, I was finally seeing the promise I'd seen earlier when I decided to use Drupal. Its excellent taxonomy system made it simple to use both hierarchical classification and term synonmyns. In English, this means I can classify documents so that they're easy to find.
For example, as I enter stories about SCO's legal fights, its OpenServer operating system, or how Caldera and the Santa Cruz Operation became SCO, I simply classify them with the taxonomy term: "SCO." Now, whenever anyone wants to see what I've written about SCO, they can just pick that term from the menu or any story about SCO, and, ta-da, a listing of the SCO stories appears.
I don't need to organize them, I don't need to set up a directory for them. I don't need to do anything. Now, some of you might be thinking, "couldn't I just Google them up?" Well, yes and no. With a search engine, you'd also get the stores that simply mention SCO in passing.
With this system, I also don't have to work on creating a separate table of contents. My taxonomy automatically becomes my menu system.
Of course, this is overkill for a simple blog, but for a complex site with many articles, it's exactly what you want.
Like other CMSs, Drupal also comes with pre-made templates, themes for your site design, hierarchical classification, and association between terms, allowing for truly flexible information retrieval and classification. While there aren't as many of these as there are for other popular open-source CMSs, such as WordPress, Drupal does make it simple to make whatever blocks you need, such as an RSS Feed from a Web site, show up exactly where you want them to be.
So, this was working quite well for me on my test site, and now it was time to start a real-world deployment.
It was then that I found out about Fantastico, which removes a lot of the pain-in-the-neck factors of getting Drupal -- and many other PHP-based programs -- up and running on a Web host.
I soon found a Web-hosting company, Hosting Direct, that supported Fantastico, Drupal, and everything else I needed, and runs on Red Hat Linux. So, I was in business.
While I still have a lot more content loading to do in my Practical Technology site, I've already found it much easier both to use and to administer. And, as anyone who ever saw the old version of the site can testify to, it's a much more attractive and usable site.
So, if you want to build a serious Web site, may I recommend Drupal and the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack that powers it. I've no doubts that, once you're past the learning curve, you'll be very happy with it.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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