I am about shoulder deep in trying to learn Drupal as intended for a new platform to implement for the NMC web site– obviously since it can do so much, it lends itself for creating a multi-faceted site with customizable themes, separate domains for different projects, and all the 2.0-ish tools you’d hope are in the bucket.
And it falls into my previously proven success at following the paths of others. I am not quite as ready as D’Arcy is to jump his blog from WordPress to Drupal (but my hat is off to him for doing so, and quickly). WordPress does all need for the blogging here.
But the ideas I have for the NMC site call for much more than just blog tools and wrangling WordPress to other forms, and Drupal sure seems like a natural fit (I’ve spent a lot of time looking at features of other Drupaly sites).
So for a first go around, I have managed to download it and get it running locally on my MacBookPro so I can safely experiment and do basic development before even hoisting on a server.
But wow- there is a lot to take in. Doing a basic Drupal is easy, but then the tinkering comes in- themes, blocks, snippets, nodes…. powerful platforms have a lot beneath them, and I am already feeling a bit pushed back knowing how much I need to ramp up, and quickly. It’s more of the same, going way back in making a switch from HyperCard to Director, in going form perl to PHP, in learning everything inside and out about MovableType, and later dumping that knowledge to begin all over with WordPress…. well the change never stops, so in I go, head first dive…
And back of of my mind, taking a cue from D’Arcy’s notion that Drupal could manage almost any content repository,if rather than someday maybe really ever getting around to publishing the Maricopa Learning eXchange as an open source software, if it perhaps could just be recast as a Drupal app? Not that I have any time to do it now, but once I get some Drupal-ese under my belt, maybe.
The funny thing is – I’m pretty sure I could have just thrown the switch from WP –> Drupal, and if I didn’t say anything about it, nobody would have even noticed. Well, maybe 1 or two people would have noticed the comment subscriptions were broken, but that’s likely all…