Drupal

L.Jenkins

Just wondering what's peoples experience of Drupal? Just running a local copy with wampserver and I want to play around with it and learn as much as possible. Just in the process of setting it up now.

L.Jenkins

Have it set up and running now. Just need to play with it for a while and see what it can and can't do.

Fussgangerzone

As a content management system, it can do a serious amount of stuff. You can add just about anything to it as a module, whether you make the module yourself or not. So it's quite powerful.

Complexity can have it's drawbacks though. It can be a bit fiddly to use, I have to say. The interface can be very off-putting.

Do you have a specific task in mind, or just training yourself up?

L.Jenkins

I'm just training myself up and seeing what I can do with it. When I gain a little experience, I may develop a module or two myself in time.

croo

I only played with it a little myself but when I queried others I know, who have used it for real live projects, and asked why it over Joomla say, they respond that if you need to do any development to extend/customise Drupal then it really shines.

I knew Joomla well at one point but rarely use it these days - many people find it complex but I always found it straight forward... when quickly review of Drupal (not development just using it) I found it to be a very nice tool. Easy to use.

osearcaigh

From experience, Drupal is most often used by software developers because it's traditionally been the nicest for custom extending. Wordpress has been the most popular generally, and has come a long way from it's blog origins in terms of what it can do. Users find it fairly easy and quick to learn too. Joomla has always been a platform for extending, so it's a little harder to learn how to use but is very powerful. The newer releases 2.5 and 3.x are all strongly OOP and both use MVC architecture.

Been playing with it for a few days and I already think it's incredible.. I've very little knowledge in anything internet related but I've already got a working faceted search system based on taxonomies (categories) done. Now I'm looking at a better way me to do bulk work and for users to edit those taxonomies themselves. And maybe a way for exif data to be applied to the taxonomy automatically.

A week ago, I was messing around learning how to make simple php searches!

L.Jenkins

Yeah, it's a great little tool for developing pretty powerful websites.

Sparks

Tried an earlier, OO-but-not-OO-as-you-know-OO, didn't like it much. But then, I was used to other systems. Even as I was kicking it though, it was a solid chunk of code that worked (it just proved awkward to do what I wanted to do in it).