Drupal

It's kind of ironic that I use Blogger for my regular blog. I currently have three websites utilizing Drupal for CMS and will be expanding that with a two or three more sites RSN. First, I use Blogger over here for daily rants because I don't have to worry about it. It also gives me a feel for how other Web 2.0 systems function for day-to-day operations.

Once upon a time, I started writing my own CMS. This was back in the day when my server, scrounge, was a 468-DX4/100. I was coding regularly in Perl, doing crazy things like making an online auction engine. I've never liked editing HTML but wanted to create content. I ended up just posting more regularly to Dan's blog Flutterby.

I was a fan of Phil Greenspun's ideas of community websites. Greenspun's system required quite a bit of ability to implement. At the time, it was based on Oracle and was written in C. Fortunately, those were tools I was familiar with but never had a chance to do anything with it. I lent out my copy of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing around 1999 and haven't seen it again. Fortunately, it's still available on the web for free.

Now I've things I want to create on the web and the new school of Web 2.0 tools are making it easier. I don't have to run my own server anymore. I use BlueHost to host my sites. I'm trying out different tools to

I played with Joomla and WordPress before settling on Drupal. Joomla's pretty good but it lacked a few features that I wanted out of the box - specifically blogging, discussion and user role models. WordPress - well - I didn't spend much time on it as it's not really a CMS, it's a blog package that can be extended for CMS. Drupal provides very flexible schema for users and content while wrapping it up with templates and central management with good plugin (module) APIs.

Recently I've been trying to extend my Drupal sites and integrate them into Google Analytics. In the process, I've come to find out that Google is sponsoring a dozen Summer of Code projects related to Drupal. And here's a great video with Dries Buytaert discussing the "State of Drupal".