Website CMS choice

tomm · Joined: 03 Mar 2012 Posts: 32

Hi Kal-
I notice you are using Drupal to manage theelectricbrewery.com. Just curious - given your attention to detail and how well thought out all your design decisions have been putting together the brewery, I'm making a (pretty safe) assumption, knowing what the scope of your site will become, that you put a lot of thought into how to implement the site as well.

You probably considered each of the "big 3", Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal - as well as probably considering other tools, how did you come to the conclusion to use Drupal?

Also, after living with Drupal for a few years, how has it gone for you, in terms of maintaining the site?

Perhaps though, you just said, "Eh, let's try Drupal", and that was the beginning and end of analysis Mug

**kal** · Posted: Fri May 11, 2012 8:13 pm Post subject:

Hi!

Yes, I did consider those 3. They seem to have the most support, and they're also 100% free. (The two go hand in hand).

For Wordpress it seemed like I would have to jump through too many hoops and completely reconfigure it to get to what I wanted. I know that a lot of big sites out there are built around it, but Joomla and Drupal seemed to be more of what I wanted right out of the box.

I had all sorts of installation problems with Joomla, it didn't seem to like me.

So Drupal it was. Is it perfect? Far from it. It's very flexible, but often I find myself just wanting to change some simple HTML but I can't... everything's more complex.

This forum is an older version of phbBB with about 80 different mods on it, simply because that's what I used on my Home Theater forum at CurtPalme.com. I know it well so it was quick and easy to set up. I tried some of the more recent versions of phpBB but then found that there would likely be at least another 30-40 mods I'd want to install to get it the way I wanted it. Some of the mods I installed involved extensive coding changes to get them to work the way I wanted. 100's of hours of work & testing. I wasn't convinced that a forum was even needed here so I didn't want to spend the time redoing it all.

Kal

tomm · Joined: 03 Mar 2012 Posts: 32

Thank you for sharing your insight into this. I'm glad you set up the forum here. Of course there's the Electric Brewing subforum on homebrewtalk, and that forum has some great info and some very helpful and knowledgeable people. However, it seems like the "tone" over there is, "How cheap can I do this?" It seems like it's almost the mission to come up with the cleverest, cheapest way to accomplish something. What I like about your forum is that design and process are emphasized more; people already know this isn't going to be cheap. There is definitely room for both styles of forums.

**kal** · Posted: Fri May 11, 2012 8:27 pm Post subject:

Agreed. I also don't want to step on anyone's toes over there by answering questions by posting links to my own site or quoting content on my own site. To me that's somewhat poor taste (even if you do pay for a vendor account) so I try and stick to the facts there and just answer plainly when I do respond. Over here I can do what I want of course! Smile

As expected, the busiest parts of this forum are the "building your brewery" forum as that's what most people are here for. I doubt some of the other forums will get much traffic but that's fine. This is not (for example) the first forum I'd think of going to for recipe advice. HomeBrewTalk's much better for that.

Kal