Tech-Wanderings of Greg Holsclaw

Mostly, I am going to begin this little monologue by covering my increasing interests in Drupal and vbDrupal. I will mostly likely be cross-posting such thoughts on the Drupal and vbDrupal sections of Skejo.com, since that is my other knowledge warehouse. But only the more complete, article style thoughts will go there. Random thoughts that may eventually cumulate into articles will go here. I probably will boast of some of my more interesting exploits while design/constructing that site.

Since I am working my way into the growing open source communities of both projects, I have been trying to write both helpful how-to articles as well as add-on modules or core patches.

Drupal was the best open source, free CMS that I could find that gladly supported multi-site capabilities, was being actively maintained/extended and was boundless in its potential. I checked out the aging PostNuke projects as well as Mambo/Joomla. Each weakly or not at all supported true multi-site abilities, or like PN, was no longer a driven, growing product.

Drupal took three looks before I finally installed a testbed. The reason was the strange nomenclature, and less ready guides for strangers. Both of these issues are still present 6 months after I became acquianted with the product, but the Drupal community is trying to standardize its definitions and create better 'I don't know anything, can Drupal work for me' type documentation. It is very developer focus, which I don't mind, as I am a fellow dev traveller, but I know that my clients will need to be able to confidently navigate a Drupal admin panel for them to be successful.

But through that, I discovered that Drupal was by far the most powerful, flexible, and yet still robust CMS out there. This notion was confirmed a month after my discovery when IBM picked Drupal as the open source CMS in their analysis.

Besides multisite capabilities, an advanced forum system was the other main requirement for Skejo.com, and vBulletin has long held that mantle. So I was excited to find the vbDrupal project which forms a secure mating of Drupal and vBulletin, sharing logins, sessions and other user data.

With my primary site being built on these two technologies, naturally my interests have become focused on them, particularly the advancement and sustainability of the vbDrupal project. Thus I birthed the first two dedicated sections of Skejo.com to cover vbDrupal and Drupal, to capture what I am learning as well as help others with questions.