Whilst I have been sitting at my parents house looking at various jobs, applying for various roles, etc. I have come to start my random dives into the web development world again, this was in no small part to a new project site that myself and a friend have decided to start up. This site was originally going to be running a copy of WordPress 3.0 setup as a CMS with a custom theme and some plugins to provide the functionality we required, however after some initial testing (read messing about with..) I made the decision to use a proper fully fledged CMS as WordPress whilst being amazing at what it does i.e. blogging, is not really suited to being a CMS. This is when I started to look into CMS applications for the site going on what I’d used before, which was Mambo / Joomla.

Mambo / Joomla whilst again very very good systems, were a little too complex for what the site needs and in my opinion a little bloated and full of things we just would never use. Yes I know there’s that age old saying “Never say never” but in this case I really don’t mind saying never as I think I found the answer to the CMS problems in…Drupal.

I’ve used Drupal on a site before and not really gotten along with it, thinking it was complicated and nothing made any sense, there were too many clicks to get where you wanted to be, theming was hard, blah blah, etc etc. needless to say I have since spent a little more time with Drupal in the past week and have changed all my opinions of the system around, and now think it’s actually one of the most feature rich, easy to use, and easy to theme content management systems available for the price….FREE!!!

I am currently re-familiarising myself with HTML, CSS, and PHP whilst building a custom template for Drupal which is something I’ve not done in about a year, but for some reason I don’t seem to have forgotten much and everything seems to be just falling right back into place where I left off. Now obviously theming an already existing CMS is not exactly as taxing as developing your own CMS which is what I was doing with this site originally before having too much work to be doing with uni, but I’m enjoying the design aspect as well as the development aspect of building this theme, and also playing with Drupal. We shall see where this leads, and if I get into a pickle with it, or if it turns out better than I thought.

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