I was recently given the job of building a website for one of our clients.  They wanted to be able to update it fairly frequently…  New fundraisers and special events showing up all the time, newsletters, things like that.  The last time I had a website like this was over a year ago and I really had very little say in what went on our servers.  We didn’t have PHP or MySQL loaded on the webserver, and it was deemed too difficult to set up, so I had to do the whole thing pretty much from scratch.

I can’t begin to tell you what a headache that was.  Every single update was painful.  Oh, sure, I made some templates…used server-side includes…things like that…  But it always seemed like I was working against the technology, rather than with it.

This time around I wasn’t going to mess around.  I’m familiar with just what a nice CMS platform can do for you.  I threw PHP and MySQL on our server and started trying out some different platforms.

Initially I thought I’d be going with BitWeaver because that appeared to have all the functionality we needed right out of the box.  Unfortunately, it ran awfully slow on our server.  It could very easily have been something mis-configured on my part…  Or maybe BitWeaver just needs a beefier machine than we have…  But the site was almost un-usable.

Then I tried out Drupal…  What an amazing piece of software.  Very clean and easy to work with.  The code is very neat and easy to modify.  Very simple to install, and very quick once it’s up and running.  I hardly had to tweak the code at all to get a decent theme going.  Unfortunately, since I knew nothing about Drupal development or anything I just grabbed the latest version…  Didn’t find out until after I’d put nearly a day of work into it that several of the modules I needed weren’t compatible with the newest version yet.  I had to scrap the whole site and go back to 5.7

Still, I’m very impressed with Drupal.  Very nice stuff.

Posted on March 17 at 12:40 PM