May
20
2006
Initial thoughts on Drupal as Primary Blogging Platform
Posted by: dnorman in Uncategorized, tags: drupal, thoughts, weblogsAfter a couple of hours of running with Drupal as my blogging platform, there are some areas that are definitely behind WordPress as a pure blog-friendly system.
Comments. Typical blogs have "name", "url", "email" and "comment" fields. Drupal has an optional "Subject" and a "Comment" field. It works, but makes it harder to follow contributions in a conversation - you have to remember to put your name in the comment each and every time you post. Not friendlyI was a bonehead - there's an option to make this behave as expected, under admin/comments/configure.- Subscrbing to comments. Email subscriptions to a post's comments is the most powerful and effective way to maintain a conversation on a blog. The "subscriptions" module would work, but it only understands Drupal's users. The vast majority of commenters (i.e., everyone but myself) won't have an account in this copy of Drupal, so Subscriptions.module is useless to them. Close, though. All it needs is Anonymous user support, with a way to provide an email address. Not friendly.
- CoComment support. Lacking. I'm going to miss that, at least until I figure out how to properly implement it. Not friendly.
- Flicker Photo Album. There's a Flickr module that claims to do something similar, but it just isn't working for me. So, in the meantime, the "photos" link in the header nav bar points directly to Flickr. Not friendly.
- Flickr photo posting. There's a FlickrInserter module, modeled after Tantan's excellent Flickr Post Bar plugin for WordPress (which, in turn, is modelled after the awesome Flock Flickr Post bar). For now, I'm copying and pasting HTML directly from Flickr. Not friendly.
- I miss PodPress. Have to find a comparable solution for Drupal. Not fatal, but it sure was nice.
Of course, it's not all cloud - there is some silver in there. I did decide to switch, after all, and am not regretting it one bit (yet). Things that are good:
- MUCH better search function. Booleans. Filters. Lots of goodness there. Friendly.
- Tracking what's new since I (or anyone) visited the site - which comments are new? Friendly.
- Throttling. If the site gets hammered (yeah, right) I have it set to shut down the bells and whistles to ensure content still gets out. Friendly.
- Content types - not just blog posts, but forums, surveys, books, etc… Friendly.
- Unpublished content, and unpromoted content. I can stage stuff without it being public until I decide to make it so. More powerful/flexible than drafts in WP.
- Stats and logs within the admin interface. I can see what's working (or not) without having to go anywhere else.
- Blocks and menus. Very flexible ways to add functionality without having to hack a template or theme. Friendly.
- Lots and lots of other great stuff.
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D’Arcy-
I love that you are making this switch- and finding the differences-
I’ve added the popstats plug-in on all my clients blogs- not a real stat package- but somewhat helpful.
The new comments in drupal- there’s a wordpress plugin to do that too-
I give it about a week before you want to switch back…
So- question- why don’t you build a drupal site- with a wordpress section-
I realize the search wouldn’t work through both sites- but- unless you add a bunch of users to your drupal install- the banter that we’ve all come to love - will be gone so quickly.
Some of this makes me wonder what’s coming in Wordpress 2.1-
anyway- keep digging for tools in drupal.
We’re playing with a Drupal install for our hosting site- and one thing that’s wierd about it- no where could we find any indication of what version we had installed (Fantastico install script) turns out it was 4.6-
thanks again for being the crash test dummy-
David
David - it's entirely possible I'll want to switch back. I guess the nontrivial migration path to wordpress might make me figure stuff out in Drupal, though…
As for the separate drupal-and-wordpress sites… I was aiming to simplify. I was already running separate WP and Drupal sites (drupal.darcynorman.net had been running for awhile - it's dead now) but it just made sense to consolidate. I'm also running a mediawiki installation, and may look at nuking that and rolling it all into Drupal…
I'm looking forward to WP 2.1 as well, and Drupal 4.8. The arms race is on - bottom line, though, is that any of these tools are good enough. I think I'll try to stay put for a round or two of the CMS Wars…
Hi D’Arcy-
testing the comment set-up.
It seems to work- however- without subscribe to comment- this is a huge step backwards. My dillemma is do I give a client a simple way to manage a site- WordPress- knowing they may use it more- or give them more bells and whistles- Drupal- and risk not having them maintain. You don’t know how hard it is to get them to understand categories, and why their home page shouldn’t be static- they are all so conditioned to Internet 1.5
thanks again-
Congrats on a switchover! I love Drupal and am looking forward to getting my personal site up and running to complement the 6 or so I run at work. Definately check out the book review module. VERY cool that one!
Are you running 4.7? I have been trying (And failing) to get K2 theme to work. It refuses to show any sidebar stuff for me. Grabbed the one from the CVS like it suggeted, but no blocks are displaying. Did it just kind of work for you?
Ugh…forced preview =)
Christopher - I'm running Drupal 4.7.0 with an ever-so-slightly-modified K2 ttheme. Make sure blocks go into the right sidebar. Even though K2 claims to support a left sidebar, it isn't rendered. Silly. A minor edit to the theme's template.php file would fix that, though.
Sorry for the forced preview for posting comments - until I find a suitable replacement for Spam Karma 2 and/or Akismet, I can't just leave anonymous comments enabled with nothing to prevent automated abuse. Sorry! Working on it…
David - I totally agree about the step backwards. Email subscription to comments makes it so much easier (or possible, even) to keep conversations alive on a blog post. It's even worse, since CoComment isn't supported at the moment, either. I'm going to be working on finding/making a solution for that in the next few days (weeks?).
Whoa … nice. I will be watching this progress as I was talking to a friend of mine who has just gone to drupal for his blog/site about maybe making the switch myself. It looks great too. I have also had trouble getting K2 to work in Drupal … any thoughts on telling us how you got it working so nicely?
I have released a fork of the K2 theme on my site. It’s cleaner than the original and doesn’t break under IE. http://www.samikhan.org/2006/05/21/k2-theme-fork
Sami, thanks for sharing your port. It works much better - and the "edit content" link works! I just dropped my style.css from my other version of K2, and it Just Worked™
I will be also releasing a Drupal version of the Papillon theme for Wordpress. I have already forked it for a new site and I have gotten the author to license it under GPL. Yay! Stay tuned! The screenshot of its Wordpress version is here and it will be posted on my site and then put into Drupal.org. K2 is here since the URL filter above doesn’t seem to be working.. D’Arcy you’re welcome, everyone else you’re welcome to join the cult of Drupal
and as D’Arcy said early today Ohmmmm Druuuuuupalllllll…
Amazing, you rock, you experimenteer. To the casual blog visitor, the difference would be inperceptible, which is a good thing. I can say my edge does not bleed enough to swap platforms, as WordPress does the job most excellently.
But I am follopwing close, trying to learn Drupal more for future web projects, and have finally got a copy running locally on my MacBookPro for development work. Thanks for sharing, as always.
The threading on comments is kind of nice….
I’ve just hacked in REALLY rough support for CoComment. It should work, but it’s sure not the cleanest way to implement support. I wound up adding the integration javascript into node.tpl.php so it’s added all over the place - not just on single-page-content-with-comment-form-displayed. But, whatever. It works.
Two weirdnesses with my hacked-in solution: