As some of you may have guessed, this site was designed using the Drupal CMS (CMS stands for "content management system"). I chose Drupal after researching it in considerable depth for the CTCNet Chicago, since it was decided a couple of months ago that we wanted to move away from Mambo, the system we had been using earlier.
I've been playing with Drupal for a couple of months now, and I must say, I'm impressed. I've used many php / MySQL systems before, ranging from phpBB (once amazing, now slowly dying under a barrage of security exploits) to OSCommerce (great open source E-commerce package), so I wasn't completely new to the concepts underlying the Drupal system.
Still, even for newbies, I think Drupal is amazingly easy to learn. It's not ready for end users the way Mac OS X is, for example, but for community technologists with some website design fundamentals, I think Drupal (and it's slightly larger brother Civicspace) are fast becoming the CMS of choice.
I plan to use this space to collect my notes and thoughts-in-progress on Drupal, both for my own reference and for the benefit of others who are thinking about using it, or having trouble with it. Eventually, I'd like to see Drupal promoted in a big way in the CTCNet Vista community, and among users of the CTCNet and DDN mailing lists...there are so many nonprofits that could really benefit from some of the features it offers. In light of that, I'd like to develop some of my notes into how-to's and tutorials on Drupal.
