15/10 - CMS :: Drupal Review
By Toby H.All of you have noticed that we have a nice shiny new website now.
What most of you may not know is how we built it, I’ll leave it to Tim to tell you all about the design work in an upcoming series of posts that will be appearing here over the coming weeks, but on they way to getting we had to decide how to run the site, and we settled on using a CMS or Content Management system.
Now there are many CMS’ out there, we’re using Joomla for the main site and Wordpress to run this blog, but to get to that decision we had to test out lots of systems to find the one we liked most and worked best for us. I’m sure you have all seen the list of CMS and blog systems in Fantastico and over the next few weeks I’ll be writing a review of all of the best of these systems and what I like about them. We start this week with Drupal.
Drupal was and still is, possibly my personal favorite CMS system, for starters, it is possibly the most simple system, anyone can use it without much work to figure out how it works, then there are hundreds of skins for it both free and paid for. It’s very clean, makes good use of Ajax and other things to make it look nicer. another thing I like is that it really guides a new user through how to set it up, which is a nice change from last time I really looked at CMS’ and PHPNuke which I found had far too much going on everywhere and came with little or no explanations and lacked options when skinning. Drupal can be made to look like a proper fully coded website, with lots of advanced features, with minimum effort from the person running the site and thats all without even starting on the huge number of add-on modules and other extras that can be downloaded and added to your installation! Maybe I’ll do another separate post of skins and add-ons that you might like to try on your own site! 
Just a quick note about security, as with all scripts you can run on your site it is very very important that you keep the software up to date at all times, mainly because out of date scripts are generally very easy to hack into, and we don’t want that to happen to any of us, but also because you might be missing out on some awesome new features!!
To round off each of these reviews I’ll give a score out of 10, now you might think this is harsh, but nothing will ever score a 10, ever. Why? Simple if something scores a 10 there is nowhere it needs to improve, and that’s never true with anything.
So with that in mind, my rating for Drupal is…..
Just another thing, if you want to suggest something for me to write about or flame me about one of my posts, drop us a ticket in to the feedback and suggestions department and you might just get to see your idea written here. We’re also interested to hear from anyone that might like to be a guest writer on our blog, so if you feel you have something that you could do to contribute send that along also, you might get to write for us! If you aren’t a current customer you can always use the contact us form to get in touch with us!
