In typical fashion, the fast-approaching SXSW trip has done wonders to focus the mind here in the e.politics bunker — and by “focus the mind,” I mean, “cause a panicked rush to finish a ton of projects.” First on the list has been to make serious progress on a client site I’m building in Drupal, the third open-source content management system I’ve used in the past year (the other two were WordPress and Joomla).
Impressions of Drupal so far? Generally good, since it’s proving to be at least as extensible and much less maddening than Joomla — Joomla’s module installation process had me frothing at the mouth more than once, and overriding Joomla’s (crappy) default presentation code always required a ridiculous amount of detective work. WordPress is relatively straightforward by comparison to both Joomla AND Drupal, but it’s also much more limited, since it’s more of a blog tool that can work as a CMS than it is an actual CMS.
Of course, the next serious Drupal problem could have me howling at the moon by tonight, so let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves in praising it. But the site’s core functions are already in place and we’re working on the visuals and the content, so it should be ready to go live within a few weeks — assuming I hit enough milestones between now and noon Friday, when that plane to Texas leaves. The Obama lessons series had to wait in the backseat for a few days, but I’ll be publishing the fourth installation shortly, with an aim to put out the fifth by Thursday and finish up the last on the plane. Life’s short; no reason not to crank it out when the times so demand. See you in Austin.
– cpd