小熊爱Drupal - when a bear meet a drop

Love Drupal

I publicly admit my love for this little blue drop : Drupal ROCKS !

You may now wonder what the hell is Drupal; it is a CMS based on the well known PHP/MySQL couple. I have been using it for about a year now on this website and I never had the opportunity to really dig in it; the basic functionalities where more than enough, and even these are already numerous. The basic install of Drupal provides you with blogs (and its API), forums, a search engine, tagging, URL-Rewriting, logs and statistics… But everything is deactivated so that you really choose what you need and nothing more. Moreover the code is clean, well documented and leave no room for creepy crappy modules which break your design.

Having said that, I recently had to start building a website much heavier than Dark Teddy for my work. I spent a lot of time trying to compare PHP written CMS like Joomla, Xoops and my beloved Drupal, and I decided to pick the last one. This turned to be a really wise choice (for the moment though, let’s see what will happen when I publish the website), and I keep being surprised by the things Drupal offers. Among these are two modules : CCK and Views. Basically, those two add-ons allow you to easily create you own types of entries with whatever fields you want and then display it in the way you want. For example, you can create a format for posting websites addresses, with a name, an url, a mark, a category and a description. You then can create views for displaying the last ten entries, category specific websites or whatever the views filter system can do (and it can a lot). You also can let the users filter these entries by themselves.

I also recommend you to have a look at the Pathauto module (automatically generates clean URLs according to a pattern you specified) and all the modules related to Google products (Google Adsense for example). If you are still not convinced and want to test different kinds of CMS (which is much wiser than just relying on the opinion of an evil bear), have a look at OpenSourceCMS ; this website proposes a simple interface to try out a lot of PHP/MySQL systems such as blogs, e-commerce applications, forums, Wikis and, of course, CMS.