I just pushed to production the first ‘real’ version of my personal site (yeah, this isn’t it! who knew?) It’s going to be mostly just a glorified container for my resume, and a place to publicly share some of the smaller random projects I’ve done/got planned. The backend is powered by drupal, which btw, I would highly recommend thus far. I’ve had no trouble busting out the first few little hacks that have came along. Most of all, it’s just clean and minimalistic… and that’s how I like it – KISS!
The epic battle of the PHP-based open-source CMS’s. And the winner is….
Drupal! Here’s why:
I spent 5 hours this morning trying to get just one simple, clean page up with Joomla with a google map embedded (using the full API, not just a linked frameset). Uhm, 5 hours later, I had managed to find a theme that wasn’t sensory overload without paying 49.99, and was still trying to figure out how to remove all the stupid polls and user login boxes and etc, etc, etc, without f-ing up the formatting. All I want is one page, two columns with margins done, a header menu, and a good color scheme… that’s it! Why is the most basic thing so hard? Isn’t that why I’m using a CMS… to make the simple things trivial?
I took a breather, thought outside the box yadda yadda yadda…. and tried cvs’ exporting Drupal to my dev environment. I was immediately impressed at how clean Drupal is. Rather than give you everything you might want up front, they only give you what you will need. You can add more as you see fit. The default css and styles are perfect – simple, clean, clear, and impressively customizable. I had my g-maps working a few hours later.
They say Drupal is better for developers and Joomla for non-techies. I dunno about the second half of that, but this developer definitely agrees with the first half.