About those New Year's Irresolutions

[hrj]

I don't seem to have posting any official New Year's Irresolutions last year, but a perennial one has been "put more new content on the web site". I seem to be succeeding at that with a vengeance during this vacation, although it's all material that appeared first in LJ: the babyname blogging, the "How Tall was St. Louis and Who was Wearing his Shirt?" analysis, and the SCA cross-dressing essay. Still, new content is new content.

I keep thinking that my next task there should be an easily accessible comprehensive index to the content (rather than the "please come and wander around through the rooms" set-up that it currently has). On the other hand, scotica has been pushing me to bring my content management into the 21st century and join the Drupal bandwagon, which might make more sense as a next step.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

You might consider using Wordpress as a content management system. I've had a brief look at Drupal, and it seems to have a much steeper learning curve for not much more usefulness, at least on the casual user level. Drupal users seem to spend a lot of time learning and tweaking Drupal, which seems like the modern incarnation of the 'build your own PC and make sure all parts talk to each other' thing: I like mine to come out of the box and work.

(Wordpress is impressive because it's PHP/SQL based - you can see what's happening, you can tweak it if you want, but much of the time someone else has already done the work for you.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

The advantage to Drupal is that scotica is a professional Drupal trainer and claning is a professional Drupal applications consultant, so the system comes with built-in tech support as far as I'm concerned.

[scotica.livejournal.com]

Drupal is indeed known for having a steeper learning curve than other CMSes, such as Wordpress and Joomla. It is also known for being more flexible and powerful.

However, the infamous steep learning curve applies to building a site using Drupal, not to editing or adding content to a well built Drupal site. (If you can post to LiveJournal, you can add/edit content to a good Drupal site.) And even then, how steep (or flat) that curve is really depends on what you're trying to do.

Like Wordpress, Drupal is PHP/SQL based. If you really want to, you can add your own PHP code... but usually someone else has already done the work for you. ("There's a module for that!" is an oft-heard Drupal cliche :-)

Especially with Drupal 7 (just released! w00t!), you don't really need to do more than install it in order to have your basic site. It's only when you start wanting to add more (and more and more) advanced features that things can get complicated.

Which brings us to hrj, who is known for regarding databases as her favorite kind of computer game. I'm confident she's going to want relational database type dynamic data presentation for her relational database type data. Drupal can do that very nicely, especially with a few key contributed modules. And, of course, she's likely to come to regard developing a Drupal site as a computer game...

Anyway, to complete my blatant self-promotion: SharonKrossa.com