Full Complement

I recently attended Drupal Camp in Irvine, a very well-organized conference on Drupal, an open source content management system for website design. I used to work with Mambo, and since then I became frustrated with the amount of work required to manage a Mambo site. I feel that Drupal has a much cleaner interface than Mambo or Joomla. It reminds me of the simplicity of a Google operated service or Moodle. I don't need a complicated GUI if I'm creating a backend to a website. It seems thought that all of these services require keeping up-to-date on the available modules.

Sometimes it seems you will come up across a need that the modules fail to address, and the only way to solve the issue is to create your own modules yourself (a daunting task) or create a tweak or hack. I like the prospect of the Drupal content management system, and I'm going to invest energy learning Drupal this year. It is promising that there are many others who have committed to improving Drupal. Mambo was losing steam and support from its supporters.

It seems that keeping Drupal running into the future requires constant management. The other area of frustration with most of these CMS systems is the difficulty of creating themes. It seems that all of them require a great amount of tweaking with PHP and CSS to get a website looking the way you want. Often times I found that I had to resort to a less than desired appearance or look because of the limitations of a theme or the backend CMS. Drupal Camp was very informative andput together (one of the better free conferences I've been to), and I see an amazing potential in this open-source CMS. I know that it has been around for some time, but I have found that I'm less interested in the next new thing, and wait until substance exists before investing my time in a dying technology.