More on the Tech Questions
Thanks for the intersting and helpful responses on the tech questions. I thought I’d offer a bit more information.
The inspiration for even considering the move stems from the work that I’m doing. See, at work we do a lot with this open source blogging tool called Drupal. Now, I’m basically a writer (yes, I admit it already) who has a bit of tech knowledge, but I’d like to have more tech knowledge than I have. I’d like to be able to go under the hood and tinker with a few things from time to time. So I’ve been toying with the idea of getting my own domain and a hosting account, and then just using it as a kind of practice space to toy with Drupal and see what I can learn about it on my own.
Of course, I’ve also looked into some other content management tools, MT, Grey Matter, Geeklog, Wordpress, etc. But for the moment I’m considering Drupal mainly because it’s what I’ll be working with.
That’s what I’m currently thinking about doing, anyway.
September 13th, 2004 at 3:11 pm
Talk to Prometheus 6 if you haven’t already. He’s a big Drupal guy, or at least he has been. When he talks about it I can’t understand half the things he says, but I’m not a real techie.
September 13th, 2004 at 8:57 pm
…should have read the entire Blogline first before commenting…but I’m with Waveflux. Earl Dunovant (Prometheus 6), who I’ve hung out with 3 times, is a great guy and is very Drupal-centric. That sounds like it’s having your cake and eating it too.
September 13th, 2004 at 10:20 pm
I’d love to hear your thoughts on pros and cons of different platforms as you look into it. On my ambitious days, I itch to get off blogger…at this point, I would probably default to MT, but I would actually do more homework before making a change. I’d love to learn by proxy.
September 14th, 2004 at 4:05 pm
sup.
I should probably read the previous tech questions, but…
If you’re going to work with Drupal you’re going to work with PHP, most likely even for site design. It has a theming system rather than a template system and is VERY different from Movable Type/Typepad in that regard. There are some good themes out there though, and for my own sites I picked a theme (called phptemplate) which let me style the site by changing nothing but the style sheets.
Right now they’re working on a minor version upgrade that will be a pretty significant change in the default look and feel of things, and feature enough changes to the plumbing that a lot of the add on modules for the current version need upgrading. I don’t know when that will happen, though it looks like the first release candidate will be pretty soon.
The key thing though, is that if all you want is a blog, Drupal is a bit of overkill. If you have plans, though, or want to see how a well conceived system is coded in PHP4, Drupal is a serious contender.
If you got questions on the what and how of my sites (there’s also The Niggerati Network) feel free to use the email address.
September 15th, 2004 at 10:44 am
Drupal works well for me, and it’s mostly for blogging.