Learning the Drupal CMS

Update:This site is now built with ECIHydra - our CMS based on Django)

This site is built using Drupal, an open source Content Management System (CMS) written with the popular PHP web scripting language. There are lots of open source PHP-based CMS's from which to choose, as evidenced by the long list of such systems on opensourcecms.com. Most of these systems aim to provide a means to manage a community-oriented site. Threaded comments, blogging and syndication are standard fare. Drupal is no exception. Even though the Evenhouse Consulting site is not by most standards a "community" site, we have chosen to use Drupal because it appears that it will enable us to keep the site content up-to-date easily, it seems to be one of the most mature and popular of these systems, and, frankly, I liked the design of their web site. I expect to post more about learning and implementing Drupal as we build out the site.

Another CMS we're watching is Xaraya. Xaraya builds on the legacy of popular early PHP-based community site systems like PHP-Nuke and Postnuke, but is a complete rewrite. It appears to be much better than the "nukes" at enabling flexible, web standards-based designs, and its security and authorization system looks to be powerful and robust, if a bit complex. It may just be the user interface, but some of the simplest tasks, such as hiding a block based on the user's permissions, yielded very strange results, including locking me out of the site at times. The primary reason we did not choose Xaraya for this site is that it is not quite at a 1.0 release point yet, and the community supporting it does not appear to be as large as the community Drupal has attracted.

One of the nice things about these PHP-based CMS's is that they are easy to install and experiment with. In fact, opensourcecms.com allows you to try them out without having to install them.

Another popular open source CMS, Plone, is not PHP-based. Plone is built on top of the Zope application server which, in turn, is built mostly using the Python scripting language. But Plone is the subject for another post.