__/ [ Robert Broughton ] on Sunday 12 March 2006 20:07 \__
> I've put up my first web site using Drupal. It's at
> http://vancouver2010insider.ca/ (feedback welcome). I've been using Mambo
> for a couple of years. I wanted to give Drupal a try because there's a lot
> of local support for it here in Vancouver.
Nice site!
For what it's worth, a serious bug (maybe vulnerability) was discovered in
mambo over the weekend. WordPress, by the way, can definitely be used as
CMS as well, so should remain a contender. I am not too sure about
TextPattern. PHP-Nuke is bloated and hard, but it gives a nice outcome and
plenty of widgets to play with (both admin- and user-side).
> The biggest problem I've had so far is with putting pictures in articles.
> Mambo has a very good mechanism for doing this. There's a module for
> Drupal, img_assist, which attempts to do the same thing. It's buggy,
> however, and I've given up on it for the time being. I'm just putting IMG
> tags in the articles instead.
In the latest of Drupal, there is a nice AJAX (iframe-based if I recall
correctly) animated progress bar, alongside the ability to upload files onto
the Web server directly. In WordPress 2.0.x you have a similar mechanism and
you can also drag-and-drop images. If you work with markup, you get the
accompanying code. If you are using the WYSIWYG mode, there appears a
picture as soon as you drop it onto the editing area. Very convenient.
> I also had to put some effort into putting up a page of links (it's called
> "Resources" on this site). Mambo does this out of the box. With Drupal, I
> first had to install a module called flexinode. flexinode gives you the
> capability to create input forms for all sorts of things. I used it to
> create a form for inputting the title, link, and description. To actually
> display the links, I had to create a static page for it, and put some PHP
> code in the page to pull the link info out of the database. Sounds like a
> lot of trouble, but now that I've gotten my feet wet with putting PHP code
> in Drupal pages, I'll be doing more of it.
PHP-Nuke has a very powerful module that handles this 'out of the box'. Links
are managed in a database and there are many schemas and options.
> The "contact us" page in Drupal is an installable module, called feedback.
> I like the Mambo one better. The difference is that feedback only allows
> one recipient. Mambo allows you to give the visitor a dropdown choice of
> recipients; you can see this in action at
>
http://airspace.bc.ca//component/option,com_contact/task,view/contact_id,1/Itemid,48/
>
> Mambo gives site visitors the ability do convert articles to PDFs and
> printer-friendly formats, and to email articles. Doing eack of these three
> things required the installation of modules with Drupal, pdfview, print,
> and send, respectively. pdfview required the installation of a
> pre-requisite, html2fpdf. send also requires a pre-requisite, mimemail.
Yes, in Mambo it appears to be built-in. Other CMS packages need it to be
installed manually and it tends to be inconsistent and somewhat flaky, at
least in WordPress.
> However, I like Drupal's send better. It actually formats the article and
> sends it; Mambo just sends a link to the article.
>
> I wasn't finished installing Drupal modules. I had to install the
> taxonomy_block to provide the capability to group articles into categories.
>
> One thing that Mambo doesn't do very well is provide for comments on
> articles. I had to install a module, ako_comment, to do this, and this
> module had bugs. Drupal handles this feature out of the box.
Comments are slowly dying as too many site invite feedback and involvement
through comments. Maybe I am wrong to suggest that, but many others tend to
agree.
> Drupal's RSS aggregator works a bit better than Mambo's. Mambo only
> supports RSS 1.0, and Drupal supports at least 1.0 and 2.0. As far as
> creating RSS feeds for your site, I got this with Drupal without even
> asking for it. With Mambo, and had to alter the template to add the
> "application/rss+xml" link to the HEAD area.
>
> I regard Drupal as a work-in-progress, and it will be interesting to see
> where it is six months from now.
Drupal is growing for all I can tell, but whether it will continue to grow, I
can't judge. It seems, however, like more people would prefer a CMS to
blogging software. I wonder why you don't use the successors of Mambo,
unless of course you are definitely ditching it.
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | Data lacking semantics is currency in an island
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