RJ’s Geeky Explorations — 2021 August

See also: July 2021 and October 2021 (View All)

I’ve been testing a drupal website this week. One of the hardest things about drupal is figuring out what to learn. I am no developer, but would regard myself as a site implementer or planner. Part of the challenge is just figuring out all the moving parts of drupal core. Then, it’s using the core features to develop a website that does what you want it to do. Then you have to figure out what external plugins you absolutely need and how to customize those things. Then you have to figure out look-and-feel issues, usability, security and maintainability.

When I installed wordpress for the first time in 2003, it was fairly straightforward: mysql + php. Frankly I’m amazed that this blog has remained on wordpress for as long as it did. I took a lot of things for granted about WordPress — that its upgrades were easy, that I didn’t need to learn many features and that I wouldn’t need to install many plugins. I’m using a mobile-friendly theme that I actually paid for, but frankly, it was a shock to learn a few years ago that a majority of my

One of the hardest challenges is figuring out what the current status of drupal is — not just the core, but the plugins.

What Drupal Needs

In many ways a project like Drupal offers an abundance of documentation. But there’s one thing that web projects like Drupal just never seem to do.

It’s nice that Drupal has a lot of functionality, and I do appreciate the walkthroughs via screenshots and screencasts. What the docs never seem to do is explain why a feature is useful.

I can usually figure out the how, I just can’t figure out the why.

When using a CMS, you start out with business needs and try to figure out how you can solve these business needs using a tool like Drupal. Take for example taxonomies (which I basically understand, but not as a Drupal content type). How does creating a taxonomy help a site? Why would a user need this? (At this point, I still do not know, although that is not a super difficult task).

there are lots of documents