When I realized that my pro-blogging and book authoring career had run its course (at least for now), I had to look around to see what might be of interest next. For a while, I’ve been interested in Drupal. Why? I don’t know exactly. I like the idea of open source. I like WordPress, but it is too individually focused for how I feel right now. Drupal feels like the right direction: it’s webby, it’s geeky, it’s about people online.
So I grabbed the latest stable release and installed it on my Mac.
Here are my first thoughts after a couple days with Drupal:
- It’s really nice that it supports multiple sites with the same code installation. I hate that I have two installations of WordPress for this blog and The Everyday Cafe. That means I have to upgrade code in two places instead of one and use twice the disk space (I know it’s cheap but it feels wrong). I did struggle to get multisite working until I realized I had to edit both httpd.conf and /etc/hosts to create virtual hosts on Apache. I’m still not clear on how the Apache virtual hosts to Drupal sites delegation works — something to investigate tomorrow.
- Drupal may indeed be more than a content management system. Though it’s not necessarily ideal as the base of a social network, you can definitely do it. And that’s what I want to do with it. I tried creating a Facebook group for my neighborhood to communicate and socialize and plan and share online. What a disaster! It sucked so bad. So now I’m going to build my own online neighborhood site. Here’s hoping Drupal is better than Facebook. I’m sure it will be — and a lot more fun to play with too.
- I didn’t even know until I read a recent post from Cote’ that there’s a venture-funded Drupal startup, Acquia. Surely I saw that when Cote’ first mentioned it, but it didn’t impress me until now — because now I have an actual project or two or three to use it on. I think that’s pretty cool even if $7M sounds like nothing to my GigaOM-jaded brain. It makes me feel that betting my project (and more important my human capital) on Drupal is a reasonably rational thing to do.
Next steps? Going to install Drupal on my GoDaddy web host account — which though it has suffered problems in the past seems to be working reasonably well now. And maybe even launch yet another blog but this time on Drupal instead of WordPress.
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Hey Anne. Great to see you checking out Drupal and Acquia. It will be great to hear your experiences as you go through the discovery process. I hope you’ll find that the Drupal community is ready to help.
Maybe they improved it with the new version. I’m pretty geeky and I found Drupal–at least the older version–too cumbersome for what I wanted.
go to
http://www.military-information-technology.com/article.cfm?DocID=2326
and search for drupal.
You’re in good company
I know we talked Drupal a while ago, with me saying that we thought it couldn’t handle a lot of the issues we’d need. But we’re actually giving it another look and I’ve been going back and looking at your Drupal posts and bookmarked articles. I am curious what you think of it a month into the project.
I did have a poke at Drupal when I was revisiting how our intranet works but ended up with MediaWiki. It didn’t seem (and maybe I was wrong) to offer the level of information management we needed without putting in more work than any of us had time to do. Be interested to hear how different it is from working with wiki solutions. Right now, we’re experimenting with Google Sites for another distributed team project.
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