This site is powered by Drupal, an extremely powerful Open Source CMS. I've put this short article together to sing its praises and wax lyrical, plus possibly help people who are just getting started with Drupal. In addition a few of my readers have queried bits of functionality, or about how I have achieved something, so this may answer a few questions.

So why Drupal?

My blog was originally created on Blogger. This was all fine and dandy for a while, but I wanted more fun and control, so imported it to Wordpress. This seemed to have infinitely more plugins and widgets and gave me a lot more control, thousands of gorgeous themes and quickly the world seemed a better place.

Then I stopped blogging for eighteen months or so, and in the meantime I developed a few Drupal sites. Compared to Blogger or Wordpress the learning curve is extremely steep. But as a developer, Drupal's structure and concepts just sit well with me and fill me with geeky happiness. So I imported my old Wordpress backup into Drupal. I used the migrate module, but it wasn't painless...just warning you if you are planning to try this.

Blogging From Drupal

In essence Drupal is made up of Content Types. There are default ones - Article and Page for example - but you can add your own. So I have Blog Post, Doodle, Photo (Thirty Day Photo Series), Blog Roll Entry and many others. You can decide which Content Types you want published to the Front Page, and that is what can basically function as a 'blog'.

I probably have a billion modules installed, but there are a few key ones that are extremely powerful. Views is one of these.

Views is an indispensable module that allows you to gather pretty much any content and display it in pretty much any way. You can quickly output tables, for example on my Archive page, or grids, for example this gallery. You can also create Blocks, such as my Blogroll or Latest Doodle sections that sit in the sidebar.

There are a few very cool modules I use that are worth mentioning. If you click on an image in this gallery, you'll get a 'shadow box' overlay which will also allow you to cycle through the images. This uses the Shadowbox module. For a lot of the images on this site I use the ImageCache Actions module to resize them, add borders or desaturate, which gives you the ability to easily do image manipulation on the server in a site-wide fashion.

I've also used Views Slideshow here, which is a quick and easy way to build a jquery slideshow of any content that you like.

It's hard to summarise Drupal but it just works. Okay, this site runs on a developmental version in which bugs do crop up and so on, but IMHO the structure of Drupal is very good. The concept is that you have a type of content and you want to display it in a certain way. So you use a module like Views to group and filter content and you use stylesheets (if necessary) to adjust the presentation. It all works wonderfully. Geeky smile.

Anyway, hope this information has been found useful by someone, somewhere...