Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

preparing for an expedition to the treacherous land of Drupal

(1/2) > >>

nudone:
I really have no idea about Drupal, other than mouser hates it and has made a cogent post about why it should be avoided. I know it's "powerful" whatever that may mean. It sounds tantalisingly mysterious - perhaps not unlike an illicit drug; I want to know what the Drupal experience is - must be quite a high when you make sense of it all - or, you just have a bad-trip and vow never to touch it again.

Well, I've been working with Joomla! and the database whiz-bang thing called Fabrik you can stick inside it. All this has been to get it to do a job that now sounds like Drupal should have been used for. I wouldn't have known that but I've just read this blog post by Tom Arah: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/02/02/joomla-1-6-vs-drupal-7-0/ and the user comments section describes exactly the job I've been trying to do with Joomla!

I have been so frustrated with Fabrik; tantalised by the promise of what it can do and then finding it the most stressful thing I've done on the computer for years - if not ever. So, my reasoning is this can't be much worse than trying to learn Drupal - maybe I'm deluded but I'm telling myself Drupal will be more fun. Drupal does "everything" so I can't go wrong there with too high an expectation.

Anyway, the point of this post is to just say, I'm at the beginning of the Drupal journey. I'll report back if I don't abandon the quest after a few days. I will be careful; I don't want to get my arm trapped under my keyboard like Aron Ralston - and then have to try and chop it off with the blunt edge of my mouse. (I think I'm already delirious - obviously mentally exhausted by the Joomla! misadventure.)

40hz:
Make life easy for yourself and waltz on over to TurnKey Linux to download a preconfigured Drupal server appliance for free.

Versions are available for installation onto hardware (ISO), virtual machine (VM), or Amazon's EC2 cloud.



TurnKey has over 40 additional appliances available. They work much like Bitnami's stacks. But unlike Bitnami, Turnkey's offerings are more up-to-date and designed for production deployments.

   

I've been experimenting with a few (Fileserver, Domain Controller, and Django). So far, I'm quite impressed by them.

Have to do a write up on these guys if I ever get a few free hours.

 :Thmbsup:

nudone:
oooh, that's good. I had no idea about them. Thanks, 40hz.

Whilst I'm here. Is there any essential Drupal literature I should look for - maybe a must have book for starting out. Though, is version 7 going to mean a lot of (old) books just aren't going to make any sense now.

vlastimil:
Drupal = lots of spam. It is too popular. Spammers invested time to develop automated tools to spam Drupal sites. Email verification, captchas, it does not help and only makes user experience worse. If you plan to make a large popular site, where people would participate, I would think twice before using Drupal.

Now, I am not sure if Joomla is better, I can only compare to WordPress (just as bad when it comes to spam) and my own custom CMS. The custom CMS is the king when it comes to spam. Anonymous (ajax-powered) comments are not a problem. Spammers are too lazy to make tool to spam just one site. Creating a custom CMS is not easy, but if you are into coding, why not try that?  :D

housetier:
There are a few books out about Drupal 7 already. The "Pro" series from Apress was very good for D6, I would expect the D7 one to be as good.

Also, look for a local Drupal user group, often you get very good tips and quick help just by asking.

I can give you the contact information of a good (naturally!) web designer who also wrote a Drupal module, if you would need such services.

I recommend Drupal, but people must keep in mind that it is not a blog system. It is designed to be extended, to provide flexibility - therefore it is complex.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page