Web Design and Development Made Simple - Iceous Design by Jokosetio Halim
Mar 30, 2010
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Best CMS - Drupal

I've developed quite a few sites on drupal, few on wordpress, a few on cmsms and frog cms. It really is depends on what functionality and features you expect from the site. Building a blogging system wih drupal is overkill. Forcing wordpress into a community driven site, is like having a fork to cut a big chunk of steak.

Drupal

When I'm working on community driven sites like voipreview.org, which is a user-reviews based site. This is my  first choice. Why? Drupal is more like a framework that is flexible enough to allow you building reviews, forum, blogs, and however you want to display the content. It's like summoning  the ultimate weapon, it will inflict massive damage to your web problem. Downside is, you need to spend a lot of time on hands-on experience before you can actually summon it and it also takes 2-3 times much more time than developing regular cms. On the plus side, you have full control of what you want to put on the site, however way you desired. An example of a drupal based site is   http://www.usmagazine.com/ .

Voipreview - Drupal based

Drupal is a very robust framework which also comes with great flexibility. You can theme any layout you want. In fact, Zen theme, like any other drupal theme, allows you to have 1 column, 2 columns, and 3 columns layout within the same theme installed.

Let say you want to have a dynamic site with 1 column on home page, 2 columns on sub pages, and 3 columns for some of the sub pages. Drupal is built with modular sections/codes which allows you this flexibility and this is what separates drupal from most cms. Design and codes separation in Drupal's core is the heart of it's robustness. This in turns, gives you more creative freedom to design the ideal layout for any site.

Modules integration is another crucial drupal element. There are well supported drupal community who dedicate their time in drupal and module development. Drupal is one of the oldest CMS and also one of the biggest fan based community.

The biggest turn off from drupal themeing/development is the steep learning curve. With all these flexibility, it also comes with complex structure. Getting used to its structure turns out to be a huge challenge for most designers who are not familiar with PHP.  A simple mishap within PHP code will kill the entire site, or what drupal community calls it the white screen of death. Like uncle Ben said: "Great power comes with ....."

 

 

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