Nate Prouty

It has been said that the best way to really learn something is to try and share your knowledge with others. To that vain, I will be documenting my experience with developing a website using Drupal: the issues I run into, my approach and reasoning behind development decisions, etc. The ultimate goal is going to be to create a website at a relatively rapid pace. There are certain ideas I have in terms of what the site will eventually become and it's my aim to prove to myself that Drupal will be the right tool for the job.

The website I will be working on is a revision of the Pickett Hill Guide Service website I developed. At the time I first created the site, a typical brochure-ware approach seemed perfectly fine, and it has been, for the most part. There is some PHP at work on the site, but for the most part it's your typical (X)HTML/CSS site. As time has gone on, though, there have been more and more ideas I've had for it that would be too difficult and time consuming without switching to a Content Management System (CMS). During the initial development of the Pickett Hill site, which was and continues to be a freelance project, I was employed full time at inResonance, Inc. developing CMSs for K-12 independent schools. So I knew then the advantage, at least in philosophy, of developing on a CMS and started planting seeds of ideas for what this site could become.

Although I had a couple years' experience developing CMSs while at iR, all of it was on Runtime SiteBuilder (RTSB); a java-based platform developed by Runtime Technologies. As with just about any language or framework, it's good for some things, not so much for others. In my case it was never really an option since 1) it isn't free, 2) it requires a MSSQL database - and that would be the only reason for me to have MSSQL (or Windows, even - I develop on OS X and deploy on Linux) and 3) there isn't a large community of people using it. Not that I choose a framework based on it's popularity, but a strong support system - typically made up of fellow developers - is important. The people behind RTSB, though, are excellent.

So, in this case, I've settled on Drupal. I've been meaning to learn more about it, anyway, so all the pieces seem to fit. There is a lot to the framework, though, so it can seem a bit overwhelming at times when seeing everything that I can do and having to filter out what I want to do. That's one reason why I originally was hesitant at going to Drupal and more naturally gravitated towards the Zend Framework (which I still very much enjoy). Zend's full support of PHP5 is also another big reason I still like it a lot. Having just learned that Drupal 7 will be dropping PHP4 and going to full PHP5, I'm even more confident in my decision to focus some effort on this framework.

As I said, the purpose of this and the articles that are to follow is to track my progress of developing a website using Drupal. My background in CMSs in general should give me an advantage, at least in terms of issues I may face and decisions I'll need to make. This particular article serves as an introduction to the endeavor. Next time I'll get more into the particulars of the project. These articles should not be viewed as any type of Drupal tutorial. It's merely, and in some ways mainly, my way of tracking my progress at learning this framework. I'm open to the possibility that I may take an approach in some areas that aren't quite right or use one module when another would work much better. It's all about the learning process. That said, if you do happen to notice something and would like to point it out in a constructive manner, by all means contact me. Until next time.