hello world!

DRUMROLL PLEASE!

After about a week of energy drinks and ramen, my blog site is officially up and running (bug-free)!

The site runs on the relatively new Drupal v6.3 Open Source Content Managment System (CMS) which can be souped up with "modules" and "themes" tailored to one's needs.  The modules and theme I am use are listed at the end of this post.

Unlike some of the other WYSIWYG online utilities such as WordPress and Blogger (both which I've worked with before), Drupal is significantly less user-friendly especially for those with minimal experience in web design and/or development. For those who have zero experience with web development (i.e. at least basic knowledge of PHP, CSS, JavaScript, and server administration), I would not recommend Drupal to you (at least the current versions) unless you're willing to invest countless hours learning from groud zero, scavenging forums and comments for solutions and tips, and debugging code.>

And no... not all Drupal add-on modules are as easy to use as Mozilla Firefox add-on extensions but the idea of modules is certainly a step in the right direction!

Additionally, many basic features one would expect a blogging platform to have such as the WYSIWYG Editor (i.e. Moxicode's TinyMCE Content Editor) do not come natively with Drupal. Rather, individual modules must be installed separately and configured to obtain these features.

I mentioned TinyMCE as an example because as simple this feature may seem, it was one of the many tasks that took me the longest to get working! (And still, it has some bugs, but nevertheless, it's usable enough for me.)

Here's a demo of TinyMCE Content Editor.

However, it was do injustice to compare Drupal to other WYSIWYG blogging platforms because Drupal is really not solely designed for blogging sites but so much more. Don't believe me? Check this out.

The learning curve for Drupal is steep but rewarding. As an advanced beginnger to intermediate web developer, I learned a lot simply by playing in my Drupal sandbox and testing out the features and interactions between different modules. Fun? Probably not. Ability to generate and administer slick, eye-candy websites without any fluency in computer langauges? Priceless. The world has gone a long way since basic HTML.

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