Drupal is another open source content management in the same vein as Joomla. I’ve read a lot about the power of the Drupal system and when I saw IBM were using it to create a solution for one of their customers I decided to take the next step and investigate it for myself. I followed along some excellent tutorials from IBM.

The tutorials cover everything from installation of the development environment (Eclipse) to creating a module. The IBM team who worked with Drupal are also constantly adding to the online tutorials so you’ll probably have plenty to do to keep up with them

What is good about Drupal

The documentation is great, particularly compared to Joomla it just seems to be more professionally written.

The taxonomy is fantastic. Taxonomy is the science of categorization. Drupal is very flexible in the way you can order your documents into heirarchies and such like. Many CMS’s are rather rigid here, but Drupal can do whatever you want it to do.

Content Construction Kit (CCK module), this is a very cool module that enables one to create a module (Drupal plugin) yourself. Once you have your data model mapped out you just tell CCK what data it needs to capture and soon you have your very own Drupal application. There is a nice tutorial on doing a Google Earth mashup using CCK here.

The only problem with CCK is it seems to be a little unstable at present, but in the future this could be an absolutely fabulous tool. Personally I experienced a few problems using the data import modules to import large amounts of data to the module I create within Drupal.

The key point about Drupal is the default install doesn’t have a lot of functionality but Drupal’s strength is it’s extensibility, cleanly written, well engineered code and a strong developer community.

What is not good about Drupal

Hmm… tough one, I’ve read people complain about the look and feel of drupal. But personally I love it’s clean lines.

The main gripe about drupal is they don’t really do much backwards compatibility which can be a pain if the module you want to use is not actively developed.

Overall it’s a great solution to someone needing a clean CMS with strong article organization and the ability to extend the application to fit your own needs. It’s certainly more focused on the programmer/developer than the web designer.