DruPal

[Fran]

I'm continuing to check through content management systems and came upon this little nugget. Anyone tried Drupal http://www.drupal.org? Comments?

"Evolt.org - a world community for web developers, is moving to Drupal".

Thanks for any response.

- Fran

[russgri]

Drupal is gaining gold standard status.
For my advocacy sites I am using CivicSpace at http://civicspacelabs.org
It is the spin-off of Howard Dean political campaign and has a lot of interactive features.
If you like hunting check out http://sportsmenafield.com

[Fran]

CivicSpace

That looks interesting as well. Thanks for the tip, I'll check further.

- Fran

[HOSTropic]

Big Drupal Fan Here

I'm a big Drupal fan. I've tried most of the open source cms packages and Drupal is most powerful yet easiest to work with once it's installed. It's not nearly as clunky or big as a lot of the applications and works very smoothly.
My online businesses are mostly ASP's (Application Service Providers) and I have one company I'm bringing up now that's built primarily around providing clients with preinstalled Drupal. It's great for community blogging/publishing.
Spend some time on a test base and try out its various options and addins. The only hits are relatively minor - no automatic install and site search is sometimes a bit of a problem. Other than that, it does a ton of things wonderfully. The template system takes a bit of getting used to but works nicely once you understand it. Quick and easy to modify at the pure css level or you can get into php.
One thing I've noticed on forums I find interesting... People who liked Mambo didn't seem to care for Drupal and vice versa. Don't know if this is true of most or just the folks I've encountered, however, I think it has to do with how we as users think a CMS ought to work.
As mentioned, Civicspace is built on Drupal as is Bryght (I think that's the spelling - check the Drupal forum.)
Drupal is also the only cms I've run across that has a shopping cart add-in already.
Also check the forum for references to the educational project. There are some folks doing some interesting things there.
Hope this helps. Let us know how it goes.

[waltonics]

I have actually installed Drupal on a dathorn site in the last few days and was just doing a search for other comments.

I totally cannot recommend it enough... seriously, if you develop websites I think you owe it to yourself to just install it on a demo site and take a look at the drupal architecture.. Mambo annoyed me I admit, and I could have spent more time learning more, but drupal seemed really when I finally tried it out just the 'right approach' and such amazing php code behind it, to me, feels like at my level I would be better off learning from them and going from there than reinventing the wheel.

blah blah, Im really into 'experimenting' with ideas of correct taxonomies, or flickr / del.icio.us 'folksonomy' ideas for navigation, and drupal is without a doubt the only cms system that can already deal with such craziness...

any other dathorn clients tried it out???

[timg]

Another one for you to check out...

About a week or two ago, I installed a series of various CMS's and messed around with them. Mambo, of course, is a standard, but the admin interface can be a bit overwhelming.

If you're looking for a lightweight CMS with a very user-friendly interface, I can't recommend this one highly enough: http://www.websitebaker.org. I have installed it here on a site I donated to a non-profit org: http://www.life-way.org and they are thrilled with it.

[Frank Hagan]

timg - very nice design on the life-way.org site! Is that from a standard template included with Website Baker, or is it your own design?

[x13317]

I loves me some Drupal

I have a half-dozen or so Drupal sites here at Dathorn.

At the end of the day, the software you use is a matter of whatever gets the job done. Personally, I am quite happy with Drupal. That isn't to say that there aren't any rough edges, but for the most part, it is well within my skill set to implement the features I miss. Making the time to do so is not, sadly.

[timg]

Thanks, Frank. That's my own work. I actually had created a static layout and then decided to use a CMS, so I had to do a bit of extra work, but I still managed to get the same layout. (Slightly tricky at times, since my PHP is virtually nil. I basically opened up Website Baker's All-CSS template and started copying and pasting code into mine until I had everything I wanted.)

The design itself was complicated enough to begin with, since IE doesn't support background-attachment: fixed properly. But I'm pleased with the result.

[Frank Hagan]

For some reason, I totally "hosed" my hobbyresource.com site when trying to install Drupal. The owner of the public_html folder was set to "99" instead of the user for the site, and even after having Dathorn reset the permissions and deleting all the Drupal files from the public_html folder (including the .htaccess file), I still get a "You are not authorized to access / on this server" when I try to browse to the site (part of that could be the cache here at work ... but that's the same message I was getting from home).

Any tips on installing Drupal into the public_html directory on a site? Anyone else here install it successfully that way?

[Fran]

Guilty...

Frank,

Sorry to hear about your installation problems. I'm feeling a little guilty as I asked the question and I've not tried it - continuing the search. I'm unable to assist as much as I would like to. Someone here must have an answer.

Regards,

- Fran

For some reason, I totally "hosed" my hobbyresource.com site when trying to install Drupal. The owner of the public_html folder was set to "99" instead of the user for the site, and even after having Dathorn reset the permissions and deleting all the Drupal files from the public_html folder (including the .htaccess file), I still get a "You are not authorized to access / on this server" when I try to browse to the site (part of that could be the cache here at work ... but that's the same message I was getting from home).

Any tips on installing Drupal into the public_html directory on a site? Anyone else here install it successfully that way?

[Frank Hagan]

Well, I got my public_html folder back to where it can display, but my subdomains don't work now. I've never had this happen before, and I've installed quite a few scripts. I think that Drupal's .htaccess commands may have something to do with it, combined with the use of phpSuExec.

I'll keep working, but I doubt I'll even try Drupal again. I have yet to find a CMS that I like.

[sdjl]

You tried word press? http://wordpress.org

David

[Jason]

Drupal/Plone

I have just started using Drupal @ <a href="http://mqtblogs.com">http://mqtblogs.com</a> and I really like it. Not only does it have a pretty nice user interface for multi-blogging (unlike those ones where you have a totally different interface once you login, <em>if</em> you can figure out how!), but it has a ton of nice plugins and easy configuration. I believe to run it from the public_html dir (installing from cPanel instead of downloading the source and doing it right), you can probably just download the entire thing and upload it to the public_html dir.. That is an assumption, I know the cms I have designed can be pushed around different locations w/o breaking.

On another note, <a href="http://plone.org">plone</a> was my second choice, but upon installing drupal (which is included in cPanel), I just stuck w/that.

I am totally unimpressed w/moveabletype and wordpress.

[Frank Hagan]

I had trouble trying to install Drupal into the public_html directory; but I got it running by installing it from Cpanel into a subdirectory.

Now I just have to find time to play with it. Work is trying to kill me.