Drupal
Drupal
Woowwwwwwwww!!!! I have completed registration of my website & have installed Drupal, as well as, Moodle.
I've been working with Drupal for the past several days and here's what I have to say:
Drupal – What you need to know
Drupal is content management system (CMS) used to create/maintain web pages using PHP
Costs
Drupal is a FREE and OPEN SOURCE modular CMS. The only cost I had associated with using is that I have to purchase my domain name and pay for hosting.
- One error I did make in setting up is that I initially selected a Windows based hosting server, when I should have select Linux based - I have made the change to Linux
- I also initially did not set up Drupal in the root directory of my hosting site and have to uninstall it from the folder I created in and reinstall it to the root folder
- There are several FREE THEMES and MODULES to use with Drupal. These need to be downloaded, uncompressed, and FTPed to your hosting server (in the associated remote folders).
- I "borrowed" a line of code from Jongpil because I could not get the hyperlink to work for the footer that states that this site is powered by Drupal - I hope he doesn't mind.
Pros/cons
Pros
- It's free
- Pages (both static and dynamic-blogs,RSS feeds,streaming audio/video) can be easily maintained, created, or changed
- According to the documentation, Drupal can be used in conjuction with Dreamweaver (there are several lines of code that need modification in a couple of files - I will attempt to make these modifications)
Cons
- Very complex interface & very intimidating at first glance
- Included themes are very basic, finding free themes is not a problem, however, choosing one is (I changed my mind on my theme about 5 times)
- Drupal is NOT WYSIWYG - this is the reason why I will attempt to get the Dreamweaver interface working
- Pages are stored as objects (or nodes) in a database, therefore no true file names - I found this out when creating my primary links items; I had to desinate node 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 for the links instead of file names such as index.html, contact.html, etc. - very confusing at first
- Very difficult for me because I usually design on the fly - since I had no ideal of how I want my site to look, I found myself making changes, then having to redo layouts because I had nothing on paper
- Don't know if this is a Drupal problem, but, I just spent the entire day recreating everything I did on yesterday. It seems as if my Drupal database got corrupted and to make a long story short - I started over.
Business cases – whose using it
- The New York Observer
- United Nations - End Poverty Campaign
- J-Lo Official Site
- Lifetime Channel
- AOL Developer Network
- The Association of Colorado State Patrol Professionals
- The Cannatella Lab
- Collaborative, Fan-Based Chicago Cubs News, Blogs, and Commentary
Why is it important to us – Instructional Designers
- As more and more content is being made available online, ID's need to be skilled in being able to deploy content as changes occur. Long gone are the days when sites are modified weekly, monthly, or yearly. Sites are being modified constantly.