When you google for content management systems, the most famous choices commonly seem to be XooPS, Joomla and Drupal. I have yet to find the object-orientedness in XooPS and I keep hearing that Joomla is hard to customize (and I’m sure I’ll deviate from what the Joomla developers think about how things should be at some point).
So, Drupal was my next candidate for a closer look. On first sight, it is rather simplistic in its approach. But as long as the right choices have been made by the developers, that can be a good thing.
The categorization module (called “taxonomy” in drupal) is slightly more powerful than Xaraya’s. You can create multiple dictionaries and organize the terms therein as a list, a tree or even as a net. The “article” module does a good job visualizing this organization to the visitor of the site as you can see below.
While is serves its purpose, the drupal default theme is blue/black on grey/white without any eye candy. The fonts are readable and chosen well, but this alone probably won’t do to make visitors feel “at home” and motivate them to choose your site over others. Drupal theme development is a bit too minimalistic, the default theme consists of nothing but a handful of html files. At least you should have no problems customizing these.
Another unique feature of Drupal are multiple input formats. This means that, for example, your site visitors could be allowed to only use plain text or basic html tags in their forum posts or comments while you or other users you trust can have the ability to publish articles using the full html vocabulary and even PHP code.
The role based rights management in drupal is, well, just as everything else, simple. You can grant permissions to roles and then assign these roles to users. As an example, you could create a role “shopkeeper” which allows all users that play this role to administrate your online shop. Limited but concise (and sufficient for my purposes).
Just like all the other CMS, Drupal also provides its own forum module. If your aim is to gather a community, a good forum is probably the single most important feature your site needs. Drupal’s forum doesn’t look as spectacular as vBulletin or phpBB2 but with a better theme, it seems usable at least. Maybe it’s even up-to-par with PunBB?
The minimalistic approach becomes even more visible if you try to build a web links directory for your users into your drupal site. There is no predefined link type yet, so you can’t really do this without installing one of drupal’s link modules - which either aren’t connected to the taxonomy and article tree at all or integrate tightly into the article tree with the side effect that the article overview now lists links as if they were articles. Right, the article module does not differentiate between the content types of the articles.
Regarding e-commerce, Drupal provides a solid e-commerce module with support for a whole bunch of payment processing services with several predefined product types (the most interesting ones being parcel, service, donation, download). Once installed, you can begin filling your online shop right away.
If you’ve got big plans (not in community size, but in site functionality) you are likely to hit the wall with Drupal rather soon, but if you can live with what Drupal provides you, the system is a real breeze.
Recent Comments