BRETT-REID.COM

A project I developed at Stonewall recently went live. http://www.eafricacommission.org.

The website is built around Drupal 5.5 and is fairly generic. I find that Drupal works great for rapid development provided the company is not a startup (ie decisions are changing rapidly). I don’t find Drupal flexible enough but for some basic/freelance projects it’s perfect. The Nepad website was perfect for Drupal but I did face a challenge when they wanted to customize their newsletter interface. Certain Drupal Modules are written in a way that they are easy to customize without hacking into the core of the module. The newsletter module is not written this way. It’s an old module and we ended up adjusting the interface to work with it.

I can see myself using Drupal a lot more in future but primarily on freelance jobs. I find the CMS interface and functionality a bit chunky and quite cluttered. I like a CMS interface that is very clean and only has things you use on it. With Drupal this is not the case. I suppose if you are some sort of Drupal Wizard you can strip it down but this would have to be done very carefully so as to not hack the core.

I am still a big fan of the Zend Framework and would much prefer having a library of modules on that as it’s far more flexible and powerful but if I am ever faced with an insane deadline or a very generic community site, Drupal will be first choice. There is also an ecommerce version of Drupal which I have yet to explore. Plus Drupalians are hard at work producing a YouTube API module which should allow anyone with half a brain get up and running with a video portal. Drupal 6 (php5 finally) was recently released and it seems Drupal 7 is already on the way. It’s a great platform and I look forward to working with it again!