PHP cms switch: Postnuke to Drupal
Drupal is not the simplest or most user friendly php content management system (cms) — Postnuke for example has a much cleaner installation and upgrade process and WordPress is perfect for a blog. But, if you are at all a techie and can handle a little php and mysql Drupal is unmatched in it’s categorization (taxonomy in Drupal terms) of information and extensibility — major pluses for larger sites. With a little over a month of experimenting with Drupal, I’m pretty confident I can achieve just about any feature I can dream up, where as with Postnuke I felt pretty hopeless with writing my own modules. Perhaps it’s just a mater of Drupal have superior documentation and user guides, but whatever it is, I like it. (sorry Postnuke fans, it worked great for the 3+ years I used it)
There are drawbacks to Drupal. The forums in Drupal pretty much suck. Sure, they can be made to look like any other forum, and have many of the features of any other forum, but the fact is it takes a lot of work. Attachment in comments and in-line images in comments are also difficult to achieve, although contributed modules are in develpment for 4.7. The weather modules available are not that great, so I will have to port the Postnuke module that I use over. Lastly, the image handling in Drupal is not great. I don’t see any reason for images to be nodes. But hey, that’s where Gallery2 comes to the rescue — more on this later.
If you are in same boat as I, looking to improve a Postnuke site, consider Drupal if you want to stick with php/mysql. I’ve got a conversion script assembled and hacked together for you.