In the beginning of December, I was elected as Chief Web Officer for the University of Minnesota Entrepreneurship club. With this came the responsibility to update the site www.ceomakers.com and make it run with a CMS to allow more interaction with club members. I am pretty accustomed to using Joomla! with most websites that I launch for clients but I have recognized that it definitely has its weaknesses. Naturally because of prior experience, my initial thought was to use Joomla! for this site but unfortunately I couldn’t get it to do everything that was needed for the project.
My specific needs for this site are to have the ability to have a custom content type for the CEO’s that speak at our meetings. This schedule on the old site is added into the database using PhpMyAdmin and then the main page has a little blurb covering the events for the upcoming week. The speaker data is also available as a list and then when a user clicks on the speaker’s name, it takes them to an individual page that has a full bio of the speaker. This is a very important item that needs to be on the site and I just didn’t see any extensions for Joomla! that would add this functionality.
Because of this, I decided to check out Drupal because I had watched a Google Tech Talk session about implementing Drupal and it seemed like it would be able to provide the ability to add a custom content type. I decided to install Drupal on a stand alone server to take a look at its functionality. After playing with the software for two hours, I found that it has all the functionality that I need and much more. With Drupal’s CCK module, I was able to make the speaker content type in about ten minutes and then through the Views module, I was able to create all the content views that were available through the old site.
Another great thing will be that the new ceomakers.com will also have a graphical calendar that will pull from the speakers list and an events list as well.
After playing with Drupal, I came up with a list of things that I really liked.
1. CCK which makes custom content types is a tool that I can’t believe that I have lived without.
2. User control is so much more extensible than Joomla! Drupal gives the ability to create unlimited user permission sets and also gives the ability to create custom user profile fields right in the Drupal core.
3. Drupal modules are so much more empowering than Joomla! extensions. Drupal modules are more able to integrate with other site services to create a unified site. The best example of this is how the calendar module that I used was able to pull from multiple content types to create an integrated graphical calendar. Joomla! extensions just don’t provide that ability to work with other extensions to create a seamless solution.
All in all, I feel that my eyes have been opened to what a CMS should include. Drupal just provides so many more functions that Joomla! can’t do.
To document my experience of using Drupal, I plan on posting about my experiences as I go through the re-design process of ceomakers.com
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