Drupal anyone?

I see some topics around here about Wordpress. I've used it a bit in a attempt for a personal site. It didn't pan out very well for what I wanted, but certainly it can do alot of stuff.

I've recently picked up Drupal about a month ago. Let me first preface, I'm not programmer, coder, designer, etc.

Drupal is very powerful and actually quite kick in the booty right out of the box. I say that with the caveat of, if you know what you are doing. lol

If you don't know what it is, its an open source CMS and has been around for awhile. afaik, it's community is super large. I won't do it justice by describing myself.

Now, how it might relate here is that the forums that come with Drupal can be replaced by others (ie., vB, phpbb, mybb, etc.). They can be integrated. I have not tried it...but am thinking about it.

So, was wondering if anyone here has experience, wouldn't mind sharing their site, or comment on this in general.

Thanks

 

For some reason I just don't get a lot of things with Drupal.

I'm using it for one site right now, and it's fine for that, but the vB integration is a little lacking (as in, they're still on Drupal 5 for integration at vBDrupal), so I'm not using that.

The built-in forum is horrible.

As you said, if you know what you're doing (or understand their instructions), it can be quite powerful.

 

I went straight to v6 for Drupal.

Yes, the concept of Drupal is quite different. Traditionally, b/c in terms of forums, we like to create teh categories and forums etc. for specific content. Well, with Drupal....to be lame duck about it, its the opposite.

Now you're like...what? (tbh, I think women should get this better :lol:, but jk!!)

You create your content first, then you assign it to its type. I know that reads too simple and again, I don't want to screw up the explanation. I would link here, but only if more ppl were interested. After a while it does make some sense.

As for integrating vB specifically, vBDrupal is not seemless. There is a specific module now though that has full support and apparently is successful. You get it from drupal site itself, iirc. Thus, it's starting to get me to try it out actually.

The only kudos I give for the stock forums, is that it is simple. Like I said, I'm doing it for a personal site, so parents and grandparents....the simpleness helps tremendously. Yet...I'd like to see if I could make the leap to vB.

 

i did originally have it on jethq.net but i just didnt understand a thing, and tbh couldnt be bothered learning, so i deposted $20 into my themeforest account and got the current HTML theme on jethq.net for $10, with the extra $10 i brought an under construction template (which is currently on design247.net) and a couple button sets..

 

Anything not WP scares me. (Blogging and CMS wise only)

 

Mean!!! The sad part is... I did get it.

 

Drupal 6 is a strong product if you have access to a capable PHP programmer. I used it for 6 months trying to create a site and ended up having a lot of problems. Hopefully they have these resolved now but I haven't really looked back. The problems arose when using Drupal 6, custom content types and custom menus. The page load would spiral out of control. I had 7 custom content types. 5 were just taxonomy changes, one was a "carbon tracker" and the last was an event type. After a couple hundred articles, I would have two or three thousand queries on the front page. When I posted questions about how to resolve the issues, all I got were emails containing estimates on how to fix it. If I am going to pay someone $5000 to fix my site, I might as well spend that on working software to begin with.

I spent several hours rebuilding the site in Drupal 5 and didn't have the query issues (same addons, widgets, menus and content types) but really did not like the template system. Moved the site to Wordpress after another few hours of work and haven't really looked back.

I am considering Drupal 6 or rather the Acquia version of Drupal for another site now though. Wordpress simply doesn't have the user registration and content security that the new site needs. Drupal will let me control it so that users can only see their own content which be very needed on this site.

 

I don't doubt any of the experience you've just shared. I'm very appreciative of it. I have not delved that far into this package and alot of what you say makes sense.

As I've said, I'm running a personal/family site with it. To piggy back your D6 woes, I've enlisted the use of Gallery2 for photos. In the interest of streamlining for the respectfully, elder folks, I embedded G2. Holy sh*t batman, was that a feat. This is the main purpose, to share photos of a growing family. Alas, with all open source products, you get what you don't pay for. I didn't have much expectations, but there are many ppl that run both applications w/o issue.

However, there are just tons of issues people encounter that do not get resolved. Whether it's on the G2 side or the Drupal side. Just recently, the module for G2 went unsupported.

As for the other content type stuff, so far so good. Blogs are rolling for people. But now trying to create new content type for Recipes using CCK, View, etc. :doh:

I like to learn this stuff and create. By no means do I expect it be top notch. I know my place and know when I will have to spend money.

 

I liked drupal until I really had to use it. In concept it is good - powerful yet control over the finest details. That was until I wanted to get up a site in a hurry, meaning less than a week. It became a hassle with Drupal since it requires a half dozen plugins as a prerequisite for another plugin, etc. and seemed like there were dozens of depencies going on just to create standard features that 90% of any developer would desire. NOw they are trying to do "packs" that include all these items preinstalled but it's still far away from that being a success. Drupal is a fine example of paying attention to too much minutae. The forums are ok at best, drilldown for search and data is minimal, understanding the need for "node" in the URL took research. Unless youre a developer building a large site with cash and time to burn, it's a pit with potential, IMHO.

 

I believe the white house site's is built off of drupal?

 

ORLLY?

 

I think I'm not 100% positive.

 

Use CMSMadeSimple. I changed from Drupal5 after about 3 months.

 

Only recently. Up until a couple of days ago, the live site was actually using Wordpress. However they finally hired a PHP/LAMP developer and switched to Drupal. Not sure if I want to call it an upgrade or not.

 

I just may enlist you for some design work.

I have a wp theme I'd like ported....

 

I was looking at Drupal as an option for a very basic site. Anyone used it recently and had success with it?

 

It's good if you make it good. I would stay away from Joomla since it and Mambo share code, and both can be very vulnerable to hacking, injection, etc.

We use something different at work, something very different. It was made custom for our company and we use tracking software for our inventory around the world and regional.

 

I just did some testing of some CMS options and one of the ones mentioned in this thread, CMS Made Simple - Open Source Content Management System was very easy to use

I may be using that one for a project that I've been putting off.

 

CMS Made Simple is an awesome CMS; I've tested it out before (I have tested out so many different CMSs over the past couple of years, just to play with 'em) and I liked it. I actually had a website with it, but then switched to WordPress. Another that I liked was www.e107.org.

 

Nick, why did you switch to Wordpress from CMSMS? Just curious.