Posts Tagged ‘drupal’

Revamping my website

September 7th, 2009

After debating over this move for a couple of months, I finally migrated my website from Drupal to Wordpress, with the help of the migration SQL code from Mike Smullin. Though I loved Drupal and spent a significant amount of time and effort in building out my site, I had to say farewell to Drupal for the following reasons:

1. Wordpress has a more standard and supported blog platform. What pushed me over was that LinkedIn allowed me to content sync’ing with a Wordpress site.

2. Upgrading is much easier with Wordpress. This is my second biggest reason because I really don’t have the time to maintain the site.

3. Theming is easier with Wordpress as well.

4. Though Drupal provides much finer ACL, I really do not need that since I am just running this one-man site.

5. My Drupal deteriorated by itself rather quickly without me maintaining the site and code. The Wordpress site that I maintained for other friends did not do that. Well, at least, they would warn me to upgrade when I logged into the backend.

So, there you have it. I am parting way with Drupal. And hopefully, I can focus on the content from now on.

Building web sites with Drupal

April 5th, 2008

In less than one day’s time, I created my personal web site on Drupal 5.7. I decided to roll with 5.x instead of 6.x because there are more modules supporting 5.x at this point. I did play with 6.x and liked its improved features, such as replacing weights with moveable items (e.g. menu items). So, once more modules are ported to work with 6.x, I will make the move. As I install a fresh copy for my personal web site, I upgraded the Infolab site from 4.7 to 5.7. The process was a breeze because of Lullabot’s upgrade video. And I expect that the upgrade from 5.x to 6.x will be a breeze as well.

I like Drupal as a CMS for the following reasons:

- Active development: At the time of writing this blog, Drupal has started its 7.x project development.

- Strong community support: Contributions on theme, modules and documentation.

- Easy to set up a site: Now that I am more and more familiar with the Drupal core, it only takes a day to get a site up with all the bells and whistles.

- Open source: I can learn from other programmers and designers.

If I were to suggest how to improve this already great CMS, here are three:

- More video tutorials: This could be very helpful for first time Drupal users.

- Most frequently used modules: A list of most frequently used modules can be helpful given the large number of modules.

- Module consolidation: I saw this happened for the Flickr module. Module consolidation can reduce the number of modules. This reduction can arguably increase the ease of adoption of Drupal.