Experimenting With Drupal

May 31st, 2008

I have felt a little bit discontented with the way the Ocean Addict site has been going from an architectural point-of-view, particularly since adding the shop which is using the ancient system of OSCommerce and its flakey table-based layout and template system. The Ocean Addict site was always going to be an online store but initially started off as a related news and information blog with the view to expanding it. However my choice of using a blog as the core of the site (even one as expandable as WordPress), and knowing very little about what open source CMS‘s have to offer, is looking more and more limiting.

So having gotten the site to a reasonable state of operation, I’ve turned my attention to experimenting with CMS‘s. Open Source CMS has proven invaluable in finding out what is on offer, as well as a few subtle hints from a friend who has been working with them since the start of his placement year.

And basically, if you want a CMS I would now say go with Drupal. It will let you create a very complicated site in a matter of hours, the setup is obscenely easy (I seem to recall a single installation page) and anyone who knows what they are looking for from the site can figure out what to do via the admin interface after a few hours of playing with it. Additionally, I used the Ubercart with Drupal installation specifically, since I was looking for a way to create a site that handles everything all in one – the Ocean Addict Community section (user-centric forums, news, blogs, image galleries) merging seamlessly with the Ocean Addict online shop.

Most brilliantly of all is the way the admin interface, and all the sections of the site use the same standards-compliant XHTML and CSS markup via the same template, helping form what I would consider a true community driven site.

To sum it up then, Drupal is absolutely insane! (in the good sense). But that is not to say I like WordPress any less, just perhaps it should be used only in the capacity as the outstanding blogging tool it is. Instead I wish I had known about Drupal sooner.