The Competition

After decided to move away from Drupal the first thing I did was try to figure out what it was I wanted to do. You could say I wrote a Specification Document for myself. I decided that I wanted the following things:

• A Blog – it is the main reason to have a personal site. A place to spout off.
• Multi-Media handling – ability to upload images mostly to create rich posts.
• Integration with Social websites (Twitter etc).
• Extensibility – the ability to customize the look and functionality of the site.
• Ease of use – it should be easy to maintain and post.

My first thought was SquareSpace, mostly due to all the ads I see on twit.tv and Revision3. Their free trial was great and really gave me a chance to play with the tools they offer and get a feel for it. It really is an amazing service, I had a really nice looking site up and running in no time. It’s very easy to post and modify the look. But my main problem with it was that you only get the modules they offer you, there is no option for digging into the code and doing something custom. Even the generated HTML seems to be set, with few options for customizing it. Everything is done through the WYSIWYG editor, and custom CSS.

Next I looked at Ruby on Rails, and after reading a lot about it and watching the screencasts I was into it. I was ready to try and code my blog from scratch and do everything myself. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that I really just want something to work right away, and play with making it better not making it work. My problem with Drupal was that I spent more time setting up, and making things work than I did actually posting stuff. I did not want to get into that again.

So while both SquareSpace and Rails are awesome they did not quite fit what I was looking for. SquareSpace is simple and easy to use, but lacks customization. Whereas Rails is the ultimate in customization but would require a lot of setup.

Welcome WordPress!

Actually I had always thought that WordPress was a hosted only blogging service, I had no idea that they offered an opensource package that you could install on your own host. Needless to say I was happy because WordPress seems to offer everything that I want.

The main advantage WordPress has over Drupal is that it knows what it wants to do. WordPress is blogging software, that’s it. Drupal’s goal is to do nearly everything you could want it to do, which is great but makes something harder for the user to do.

WordPress makes it easy to upload images, write posts, and manage it all in a clean and nice to look at interface. The raw PHP themes were a little hard to grasp, and I am still tweaking them, but they offer a lot of power. And via the Modules I can extend the functionality of the site if I need to.

Also, because of the higher profile of WordPress it is much easier to find pre-made modules, and other sites make sure they work with it.

But is it Good?

So far I am liking what I see, but I am far from an expert. The theme system took me a few hours to figure out what was going on, but after examining some other themes and playing around I got something working pretty quickly. Hopefully modules work just a well.

Anyway, I got a few database warnings when upgrading and the site is acting a little funky. I just cleared the site cache information and it seems to be working a little better. So hopefully that was it.

However I am considering clearing out all the info in the database and starting from scratch. I have over 1000 users and when I was looking at them 90% are spam users who must have got in before I disabled user accounts.

I will continue to post as I go so we can experience it together.

Revision3 and Twit.tv are two of my favorite sites to visit, and as any fan of those site will know they bombard you with SquareSpace ads. So know that I am looking into options I decided the give them a look first. After signing up for their free trial I was quite impressed with the WYSIWYG editing features. I quickly had a decent looking blog site up and running in a few hours.

The thing I like the most is just that they take care of all the little things for you, like layout CSS, blockquote formatting, and story entry. These little details always seem to end up taking the most time.

The post entry system is also nice.

But that was before I looked at my user list. My user list is packed with obvious bot names. And it seems like some of the users have visited a couple of times recently. So I know that if I enable comments again I will just be flooded with comment spam.

Seems like a new version of Drupal is coming out soon, so maybe I will upgrade to that and try some of the anti spam modules out there. Probably just one of those anti-bot images when user register will work out.

Another option would be to start a forum up again, but sometimes I find it depressing when I only get 1 post a week and it’s mine. So I will see what happens.

When browsing over the change log a few changes jumped out at me immediately. Admin page retool, web installer, JQuery, block system, PHP Template, and removal of Drupal.css all are significant changes.

Admin Page Retool

The main change here is the ability to theme /admin pages. A long time ago the admin section of Drupal was themed completely separately than the rest of Drupal, in fact it may not have been posible to change its theme at all. Then just as I started developing for Drupal there was a new “feature” that made the admin section use the site theme. I was against this from the start.

Developing a good theme is not an easy task, it’s important to have control over all the html that is going to be output to the browser so you can apply styles accordingly. The admin section has a lot of tables, lists, and forms. It has a lot more stuff in there that not many sites have in their basic layout. So whenever you develop a theme you have to keep in mind how the admin section will be affected. It is just another thing a style designer does not want to have to worry about when developing a site.

Also, it makes Drupal tutorials, and instructions much harder to make. When there is no common admin interface for everyone there is no common ground for us to build upon. For example. Lullabot has been making some useful Screen Casts for Drupal where they show you how to do cool things in Drupal. They mostly use the default Drupal theme to keep the interface consistent, but if anyone has themed their site at all their admin section could look completely different. It just makes it harder to communicate.

By default I would like to see the admin interface keep the standard theme, and give the developers the option to theme the admin interface if they want to customize it. This will mean a lot less work for theme developers at the start, and a more consistent experience for Drupal administrators.

Web Installer

This is a big feature that has been in the works for a long time. All the ease of installation features are nice, but Install Profiles are the biggest part of the Web Installer. Profiles allow you to create specialized Drupal installs that meet a specific need. For example, you can now make a Drupal blog profile, which will install just like Drupal, but at the end you will have a full featured community blog that is pre-configured with all the needed modules and settings.

I think that this is how Drupal should be used. Drupal is more of a development framework than anything else. With this new installer you can leverage that framework for a specific task and make it easy to install and use for people not looking do develop a site from the ground up.

Drupal is powerful enough to implement nearly any of the popular web applications out there right now, like Word Press, del.icio.us, Digg, etc. With this new installer maybe we will start to see better cohesion of similar modules and resulting systems that rival other very focused web applications that are already out there.

PHP Template

The biggest change here is the ability to apply Block templates based upon the region, module, and delta value. This is another step in moving away from the standard column layout of Drupal. Now you can place blocks in any region of the html file, and theme them differently based on where they are. So you no longer need to just have columns with blocks in, you can put blocks anywhere.

I was planning on doing this already with my site and 4.7.3 by adding a recent nodes block under my main node listing on the front page. Maybe adding a book review block, and other fun stuff like that there too. But this new feature will make it much easier to implement that.

Final Thoughts

I listed more features than I discussed here, but I think the benefits they bring to Drupal and the users are pretty obvious.

Overall these changes are great, I am really looking forward seeing what Drupal 5.0 can do. When I get my home development network setup I am planning on playing with the cvs version and see what it can already do. Seeing as the there is a freeze in place already I am thinking that it is going to be pretty stable already.

Unfortunately some of the changes to the site are so fundamental that I have decided to start fresh with 4.7.3. This means that all the previous content is gone (which is no real big loss), but I also lost the user accounts which I am more annoyed about. I apologize to the users that already had accounts created, and hope that you will consider signing up again, and posting comments.

Free Tagging

For me Free Tagging is a huge new feature in 4.7, it basically allows you to assign “tags” to your posts on the fly when you write them. The idea is not new, it has been a central feature in sites like del.icio.us and flickr, but it is new to Drupal and a welcome addition.

In the previous version of cmx.net I had to think of all the relevent categories ahead of time. This was not only time consuming at the start of setting up the site, but quickly became constrictive when actually creating content for the site. Normally I would select any of the pre-made categories that were closest to the content, which were not always the most descriptive or best choices.

With Free Tagging it is now easy to tag the content as it’s being created with the most relevent and descriptive tags possible. It is not possible to create descriptive tags without having to input hundreds of categories before hand.

Another great side affect of Free Tagging is that it opens the door to implementing other nice features, such as related items, and other technologies that can dynamically map the content of the site.

PHPTemplate as Default

The PHPTemplate system in Drupal basically provides a perfect balance between power and usability. At the start you just have simple HTML blocks in template files. If you are designer you can leave it there, or you can easily inject PHP code into any template block, and manipulate the data being fed to the theme in anyway you want. The power and flexibility this system provides is great.

Seeing PHPTemplate becoming such a central part of Drupal is really nice to see. I remember when a few other developers and I worked on cleaning up the theme system in 4.4, and started making the push to the great system that is in place today. Brings back memories of when I released Marvin 2K for the first time.

I never thought it would become so powerful, and useful so quickly. The whole system is a credit to the developers that have built this great system on top of those foundations.

File Attachments

From 4.5 to 4.7 this feature has gone from a buggy hard to use module, to a fully integrated and easy to use system for attaching files directly to nodes. If even use AJAX to upload the file without and page refresh, and provides a progress indicator. A very useful feature.

Now if only images worked in the same way, you could attach any images you want to put in your post and link them into the body of the same post. That would make the creation of reliable in-line images a snap.

Node Revision Controls

The Node Revision control system has actually been a major feature of Drupal for quite awhile, but with the new release it has become easy to use and makes it really useful for any site. Basically whenever I make a major change to a long post, or one of the static pages of the site I can just check the “Create new revision” option, and after submitting I will have a new revsion of the post, and a copy of the original post that I can revert to at any time. If I only want to make minor changes then I can just leave the box unchecked and make the minor changes without having to create a new revision.

The whole system is just slick, and so far is working like a charm.

Block Regions

Have not had much time to play with this yet, but the basic premise is that instead of having a few regions of a page like right sidebar, left sidebar, etc you can define any arbitrary region and theme it.

This opens up a whole new level of flexibility that was has never been available in Drupal before now. You are no longer restricted to simple two or three regions or columns on a page. You can lay your site out how ever your want, and place fully customized blocks in any one of the regions.

Final Words

Overall Drupal 4.7 is another step forward, that is the best thing about the Drupal project. None of the developers are scared to make changes as long as they move the project forward and make it better. Sometimes the benefits to the changes are not instantly apparent, like the theme changes I helped make in 4.4, but you start to see the pay off further down the line when you see what the developers have built from those changes made back then.

Now I am going to start looking at some third-party modules, and see which ones have potential.