So I thought I needed to get out and write a technical piece on this blog. Most of all I have written have covered everything but computers. So this one is long overdue. To be honest, I did write a piece on the .sb cctld but that is still in draft stage and I will soon publish it once I have polished it up a bit more. But the motivation for that article is the obvious lack of understanding people have about cctld’s in the Solomon Islands and the misconception that owning a website means owning a 2TLD domain.
Well, this article is on Drupal. Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS) whose history you can google and save me a paragraph. But my experience with Drupal is fairly recent and I struggled with migrating to it from Joomla. I still maintain to this day, that Joomla is user friendly, easy to use and is also a great CMS. But that’s where my comments stop and I will not go into the seemingly endless debate on which is a better CMS. I started on Drupal in 2006 and I have never looked back, most times mistakenly believing that it is the only CMS in the world.
A few months ago, a debate sprung up on one of our popular forums on website development and one gentlemen lamented that CMS are rigid. Are they really? Not that I can see with Drupal; I believe the approach is to see CMS’s as a framework on which you build your website. Squinting at it as if it were a website will limit the potentials that CMS’s can give you. I grappled with this concept when I first started on Drupal but now I am confident that CMS’s are great tools to build websites and Drupal is a great one at that.
Another important point that was raised during the course of that discussion was the definition of a website. Let’s face it; the web has evolved so much, websites too have suffered a natural progression for the better. Gone are the days when websites were your roadside poster on the super-cyber-highway. A website to me is now “an aggregation of services that help the end user achieve a certain task”. If you find a website that does not offer anything other than a good read then it has its feet still deeply entrenched in the dark ages. Drupal as a CMS achieves this by providing modules that build on the basic foundation to give you a great website in the end.
If there was anything that I would be excited about, its that Drupal is now slowly but surely moving into social networking. I built a website for an easter basketball tournament using Drupal. I installed Google Analytics and it shows that there is already a huge following; negligible by international standards but a following that shows potential. Translating that website into a social network where each individual member of the teams registered on that website can interact using that space certainly has potential to achieve what my superiors have always wanted ‘generating some local traffic’. At present it has with already over 200 visits and more than 2000 page views and an average of 13 minutes spent on the website. Statistics like this to me show great potential.
On my endless pursuit to drupalize every site I lay my hands on, all Our Telekom websites will be ‘droopled’. Our corporate site is undergoing a major facelift with a launch date set for the end of May. I am excited about that site because our approach has changed considerably and it may well be a huge diversion from the usual when it is actually launched. Our internal intranet is already running on Drupal 5 and migrating to Drupal 6 is our next major project.
The other day, I walked into one of our outlets and saw a group of young primary age kids huddled over a PC at our Internet Cafe. What could these kids be ‘honkering’ over? I guess Facebook? There is great potential for social networking and I intend to find out just how great a potential it is. Finally, I was heading out the door when my nephew called and said, “Uncle, you know the online art course I enrolled in? It starts on Monday and my teacher is from Germany!” Now thats another great idea and Drupal will certainly be able to cater for that.