Drupal and me

This weekend I've been working with the Drupal CMS platform for the Naturheilzentrum Drochtersen website that I set up for my brother- and sister-in-law.

I looked at a number of packages. I've been away from Movable Type too long to be able to shoehorn it into a traditional CMS. The page feature in WordPress was not sophisticated enough for the 4 layers of menus and approx. 50 pages. Mambo/Joomla seemed too inflexible for the given layout and menu struction. With Drupal the first hurdle is the documentation; I was unable to find a simple howto to get started.

Once I got into it, I found that Drupal could do 90% of what I needed, which is as good as anyone could hope for. I'm going to have to fiddle with the menu code get the highlighting right, but the functions are 'themeable' and there's a well-documented (although somewhat convoluted) API.

One stumbling block is that the layout for the website and the admin interface are the same, so I had to do a lot a CSS fiddling to import an existing layout without breaking the admin interface. A nice feature is the wide choice of theme engines; simple tags were not enough for me, however with PHPTemplate I was able to implement what I needed in PHP.

The live site still contains static pages from City Desk, but once the menus are tamed I'll be able to put the Drupal site online.