The Good in Drupal

Now, before I get yelled at for hating on Drupal in my previous post, let me state that Drupal has a lot of great things going for it.

1. It’s open source.  Anything open source is good in my book because it’s all about sharing information and allowing creativity to flourish all in the name of making something even better that what you started with. And that’s what the internet is really all about, no matter what the idiots in Congress think. There’s my rant about why SOPA and PIPA were never a good idea to begin with for today.

2. There are many dedicated people working on it. They know their stuff and are really passionate about Drupal.

3. There are more modules and add-ons than you can shake a stick at. If what you need is not already available in some form, chances are good that someone is already working on it. Or if you have the know-how you can write it yourself.

4. Possibilities. Once you really know what you are doing, there is just about endless potential to what you can do with Drupal.

 

It Begins

So I’ve been half heartedly working on a Drupal site for the past several months. The ultimate goal is to get an e-publishing site up and running. Unfortunately, I’m stuck. Again. This is why I hate Drupal. With the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns in the middle of the Gobi Desert with no water for the past two weeks.

To start off with, I didn’t even want to use Drupal at all. I had planned on using Joomla!. The business that I interned for used Joomla! for their website and it was amazingly easy to pick up. So I downloaded Joomla! and spent about a week playing around. It all seemed very straightforward, so I started looking for a commerce/shopping cart module (this being one of the most important parts of an e-commerce site).

I couldn’t find one.

Correction: I couldn’t find a free one. And all of the paid ones had reviews about how difficult it was to make them work with Joomla!, bad glitches, and little to no tech support. Sorry, I’m not shelling out $200 for a product that doesn’t work like it should.

Drupal, however, had a commerce module that was pretty highly rated, given all the bashing that exists online. Now, keep in mind, I’ve already built two different sites with previous versions of Drupal (versions 4 and 5 maybe? It’s been a while.). So I gritted my teeth together and downloaded the latest version of Drupal.

At first, I was pleasantly surprised. Drupal 7 is far superior to the other versions that I’ve worked with. Its much easier for non-programmer/techie people to figure out. The layout is much less confusing, as the Admin Dashboard has been reorganized, and some of the redundant stuff has been consolidated. Even the Commerce module that I’d never used before seemed, on the surface, to be fairly easy to figure out.

Then I started getting down to the nitty gritty. Nope. Still the same old Drupal.

tbc…