n01getsout

Recently I decided to switch my website to Drupal. Drupal is an advanced CMS that includes functionality such as blogs, wikis, forums, user management, and more. It's functionality can be extended through a wide variety of modules that can add almost anything. It can be themed to look like almost any way you can think of. If you want to get an idea of what can be done with Drupal, just check out some of the sites using it.

My website was previously a mix WordPress for my blog and custom PHP that pulled data from a MySQL database for everything else. This worked well for a while, but maintenance seemed harder than it needed to be. I also didn't like the visual difference between WordPress and the rest of my site, despite my efforts to create a custom theme for WordPress.

Drupal takes some time to learn but is well worth it. With Drupal, I was able to recreate my site exactly as it was before. Drupal made updating my website simple with things like URL aliases. I could redirect the pages that Drupal created to the URL where the page existed on my previous site, without manually editing .htaccess files to use Apache's mod_rewrite. I was able to use the CCK module to create a custom freeware content type and the Views module to display my freeware lists. Drupal also uses role-based permissions so I may allow guest articles in the future.

If I was smart, I would have looked at importing my data from WordPress before I deleted my old site. I did however download a whole copy of my site using HTTrack, so I was able to just cut and paste. Drupal allowed me to set the post date to match the date I authored the original post. I also installed the Pathauto module so it could create new URL aliases for blog posts automatically, just as Wordpress did.

The upgrade wasn't entirely hassle free. I created a view for my freeware list so I could sort it the way I wanted and when I tested it, everything was working as I expected. I then made a URL alias that pointed Drupal's taxonomy term to my own custom URL (in this case /freeware/windows/apps) and told the view to use /freeware/windows/apps as the path. This caused the view to not work and Drupal displayed the normal, unsorted list. After playing around with it for a while, I finally figured out that I needed to use Drupal's taxonomy path (for example /taxonomy/term/5) in the path field of the views module.

Hopefully I will update my site much more often now, as I have been neglecting it for quite some time. Let me know if you have any suggestions for freeware or ideas on how I can improve my site.