Over the last week or so I have really been thinking hard about what content management system we should go with for a community portal I am working on with my friend Rin. It all started when she discovered Expression Engine, which oddly enough I had never heard of. I have to admit the sites that use it have some sweet looking designs and themes, with a solid use of xhtml and css for lovely, standards compliant code. It was enough to drop any idea of using php-nuke’s boxy, nukey, table-based CMS for our portal and to start to research an alternative in earnest. Of course, at the top of my list was Drupal.
I would have considered it sooner except that I was turned off by the depth and organization of the information on the Drupal site, the apparent complexity of installation and modification, and the morbidly uncool collection of themes (the exception being Metatheme by Ken Collins). In spite of this, I began to think Drupal might be what we were looking for, especially when I came across the CivicSpace distribution (they’ve just updated their website, by the way) with a lot of what I would like to see featured in our portal already included with the initial installation.
What really clinched it for me, though, was a great interview with Jeff Robbins of Lullabot, who is apparently porting the new design for TWiT.tv to Drupal for Leo Laporte and Co. He was fantastic evangelist for Drupal, and it reconfirmed why it is I prefer Open Source to something proprietary like EE. Better yet, he was modest and encouraging, and he seemed to be saying “If I can do it, so can you”, which was just what I needed to hear. So, Drupal it is. I’m looking forward to getting started!
And the winner is….Drupal!
Over the last week or so I have really been thinking hard about what content management system we should go with for a community portal I am working on with my friend Rin. It all started when she discovered Expression Engine, which oddly enough I had never heard of. I have to admit the sites that use it have some sweet looking designs and themes, with a solid use of xhtml and css for lovely, standards compliant code. It was enough to drop any idea of using php-nuke’s boxy, nukey, table-based CMS for our portal and to start to research an alternative in earnest. Of course, at the top of my list was Drupal.
I would have considered it sooner except that I was turned off by the depth and organization of the information on the Drupal site, the apparent complexity of installation and modification, and the morbidly uncool collection of themes (the exception being Metatheme by Ken Collins). In spite of this, I began to think Drupal might be what we were looking for, especially when I came across the CivicSpace distribution (they’ve just updated their website, by the way) with a lot of what I would like to see featured in our portal already included with the initial installation.
What really clinched it for me, though, was a great interview with Jeff Robbins of Lullabot, who is apparently porting the new design for TWiT.tv to Drupal for Leo Laporte and Co. He was fantastic evangelist for Drupal, and it reconfirmed why it is I prefer Open Source to something proprietary like EE. Better yet, he was modest and encouraging, and he seemed to be saying “If I can do it, so can you”, which was just what I needed to hear. So, Drupal it is. I’m looking forward to getting started!