After some years experimenting with several blogging systems as for example Blogger and WordPress.com and .org I almost by coincidence, finally, understood what a Content Management System (CMS) actually is. As I had been thinking about starting a (yet another) new blog/homepage, I had a look at some background information and got interested in Drupal. As my web-hotel provider only allows one mySQL database per domain I decided to buy a new webhotel to install and experiment with Drupal.
Now, a little more than a week later, I start to get closer to understanding what such a CMS is. I read the beginner-chapters on Drupal.org and the “cookbook” that also can be found there, and I now know that Drupal is software that tries to make it easier to build a homepage without losing too much of the flexibility when building one using templates. Unlike for example WordPress, Drupal doesn’t work with “standard” pages that together form a blog, but it constructs blocks of information or content that can be used on different places and in different combinations. In Drupal you don’t build a page but you build blocks that appear whenever the presence is triggered by someone clicking a link or a query… something like that.
This makes Drupal more flexible than for example WordPress but it definitely also makes it harder to understand its concept for a beginner like me. Drupal has many modules that can be installed to add functionality to the core, but it is not easy to know which ones are needed now or later. One has to understand the basic concept of Drupal first and then one has to plan a website/blog well before the actual building can start.
WordPress is proud of the fact that it “only takes 5 min” to install and start running a blog with their software. Drupal will might take a week for most people but it probably indeed can add more functionality to a site. When used clever it can for example fairly easily handle multiple users with different rights and possibilities for each and every block of information or adapt a site to the operating system or the location of a visitor. It has different ways of building menus and can create many types of input or output “blocks” that can be placed in the often many places/regions on a page that the chosen theme allows.
I am not perfectly sure whether I really need all this, I actually don’t at the moment, and at some occasions during the last week a quick switch to WordPress definitely crossed my mind, but for now the learning process is exciting and might provide good possibilities later.
I look forward to continue building and to start using Drupal, as I sense that all the explanations, suggestions, instructions and information about possibilities I read this week can make it more confusing than it actually is.
