I migrated to Drupal

Written at 08:23, on Thursday 9 March 2006. Tags: drupal personal website .

This website is now powered by Drupal! I’ve tried to keep as much of the old content, theme and functionality as possible so you should see little difference, besides a splashing new homepage and various little tidbits. Learning about Drupal, getting to know how it works, reading the documentation and scouring the fora took a couple of days. Setting up the content, the menu’s and the taxonomy, and migrating everything took approximately a day. Migrating the stylesheet and creating a new theme took another day. Finetuning every little bit of Drupal to fit exactly the way I like it took approximately a week. —(Yeah, I’m a perfectionist. I wish I had this much time to finetune client websites!)— Old links should still work (well, most of them, anyway) and I’ll probably make some URL aliases for the most common broken ones. Some of the things which I noticed while working with Drupal.

• Content entry and organization is very powerful. The taxonomy system takes some time to get used to, just as the concept of nodes and content types. If you’re starting with Drupal, I suggest to not bother with taxonomies at first but get as much content in there as possible. Start organising it in the various content types (which by default are book pages, static pages, stories and blogs). Then assign proper URL aliases to them; the pathauto module is very useful for this. And when you need more content organization, start meddling with taxonomies.

• I love the ability to create pages which are made of PHP!
• I love the ability to create blocks (pieces of a page) which are made of PHP! See PHP snippets
• The themeing capabilities are very powerful, and allow you to customize almost every aspect of Drupal.
• URL handling is excellent in general. The pathauto module should be part of the core though, with some reasonable defaults. The default URL generation (node/id) is plain ugly.

• For a personal site it’s less exciting, but the way access controls and user roles are implemented is also very powerful and extensible.

Coming from Mambo and Joomla, I sorely missed the ability to easily reorder the way items/nodes are displayed. You simply can’t arbitrarily control the order in which nodes are displayed! This was very annoying when I started working on my homepage, because I wanted the About node at the top, and then the last three journal entries, followed by a list of links to older entries, followed by my linklist and ending with the articles list. I resorted to the weight module, but this removed the ability to style sticky nodes differently from non-sticky nodes. In the end, I created a view which was sorted by how editing date, a very crude (but in the end, functional) hack.

I also missed a separate administrator template. The templates which are included with Drupal are not very optimized for pure content management or system administration, but instead try to do everything from one template. This means they do neither very well. I’ve looked at some other templates but I haven’t found a suitable, user-friendly and usable administrator template yet.

Coming from Textpattern, I missed the ability to control every aspect of the HTML output. I spent some serious time to hack out drupal.css, and it seems that drupal.js is included by default now. That’s very inefficient and increases development, because it means that every theme you make must override some defaults (I was debugging a CSS problem when I noticed that it came from drupal.css). I can see where the decision to include it by default comes from (namely to make it easier for beginners to create templates) but it’s annoying for power users and should be included with a statement in the template, not spit out by default in a non-related function.

The second problem, for which I don’t have a decent answer, is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to wrap all comments in an element, for example to style them differently or to mark them up in an ordered list. I ended up hard-coding it in the Drupal comment module for this (if you’re interested in my patch, please leave a comment). It seems there should be a way to override the default output with some PHP, but that requires some serious programming skills! I’ll ask someone at work…

A big usability problem with Drupal is the way the administer menu is organized. It seems to be a direct reflection of the actual implementation, instead of a goal-oriented reflection of the user’s mental model. I seriously hope there are some IA(Information Architecture) practitioners or usability experts who wish to help improve it, because it seriously sucks and is efficient for nobody except the developers perhaps (because they know it by heart).

Despite these comments, I’m very happy with Drupal so far, and it’s a much better base to build on then Mambo or Joomla (so many of the things which are only now finding their way in Joomla are already in Drupal). I’ll miss Textpattern a bit, but the ability to enter PHP in Drupal will compensate mostly.