The most annoying thing about moving blogs is that I’d have to do all my links, all the stuff in my about page, the categories and all that other stuff all over again.
It’s taken me a long time to decide which free blogging place to use and although wordpress.com has its limitations, it’s certainly less limited than blogspot and LJ. Or at least, as far as I know since the last time I checked, which has been awhile. Suffice it to say I’m not completely sold on staying here, and I do wanna check out the others, although it’s time consuming and besides, it’s just for a personal blog right?
Nah. You know what? Why don’t I just go flat out and just say I’m lazy. Yeah that hit the nail on the head right there.
At any rate since I’m rambling here, I’ll just make a quick mention of the fact that I’m happy I’ve finally gotten a hang of Drupal and it’s companions CCK and Views. And you know what? The mere fact that I actually take time to mention such a thing is proof enough that dealing with Drupal is not a task for the weak, no sirree.
I’ve known ‘the power of Drupal’ for some time now, and have been quite aware of its success, but I swear to God learning how to develop a fairly ordinary site using it sometimes makes you wanna tear your hair out. But lo and behold, as of the latter part of last week I actually had something decent going for a client, and it looks like I’m pretty much on my way. Of course having said that some ginormous complex problem is gonna crop up that will stun me yet again, but I’m pretty confident now, at least more than in a long time since I’ve been trying to get it going.
In the meantime however, I’m almost sure I can answer near 90% of anything WordPress can throw at me. I know it sounds like hot air but it’s true, and given the fact I run a whole bunch of WordPress sites means that I should be pretty good at it by now. And also, I’m just saying that to compare how difficult Drupal is, as compared to WordPress. I’m sure a lot of Drupal diehards are gonna wanna scalp me for saying that, but hey, it’s true. It’s very powerful true, but it’s also very very difficult to customize and theme.
Many times I felt like just making the site from scratch but for some odd reason, I hung on. It might be because I like pain, but more likely it’s because I think I kept finding something nice about it which is why I kept at it. Now that things are moving along I’m actually starting to think of new projects that I can do with it.
No, actually two. One has to do with a techie type site where I can post howto videos that deal with mostly webmaster subjects (and yes, I hope to include WordPress and Drupal howtos in there), hopefully to help keep people from having to spend a hell of a whole lot of time grappling with it like I did, and also because since Paypal has (somewhat) finally allowed incoming cash in, I wanna give the ‘Donate’ Paypal method a try. I think it might work.
And the other project has to do with a directory slash registry type of listing with a membership system that’ll help people find a certain thing faster. Nope, no details yet, I don’t wanna get that idea stolen. Besides, I really haven’t gotten deep into the details of theming a Drupal site as well as I’d want it to look which means a look as far away from the ridiculously ugly geeky default themes it comes with. Yep I know I am once again stoking the ire of the Drupal faithful, but I challenge everyone other than the medically blind to say that the default themes are pretty. I mean seriously.
I have delved into the world of Drupal this year and I don’t think it’s difficult to theme.
This could perhaps be because I started off with 5.1 and that version made themes easy. In fact my first site was going to be on 4.7 but I read a lot and waited for 5.
What I think is very difficult is the customization. I am still trying to figure out cck and views. If you want to do really interesting things on a site, you have to figure out how those two modules work. And you also might have to write your own module at some point.
Well i’m glad you said theming was easy on 5.1 Arden, because that’s what I’m about to get started with.
We’re really on opposite sides of how we got started. I started with 4.7 or even earlier I think, and I promise you I couldn’t make heads or tails about theming.
On the other hand, I think I have effectively gotten a grip on CCK and views already. Once you’ve got a foothold in understanding how it goes it becomes easier, although I admit its getting that first grasp that’s hard. In fact I promised myself to make a tutorial one day. I’ll see if I try to do that soon.