DrupalI’m of two minds about website Content Management Systems (CMSs). On the one hand, they make getting information into a site much easier. You don’t have to know HTML (let alone PHP, etc., etc.) to use one. On the other hand, they are limiting and (worse) they are seductive.

The idea of a CMS seems to particularly appeal to the people who drive me the craziest in the web universe. I’m talking about those who believe that even though they can’t do a website themselves that doing a website should be easy. Not just that is easy, but that it should be easy. So it’s the webmaster’s fault when inevitably it’s not? A webmaster doesn’t really have that much value?

I’m tempted to go into a major rant here. At times such people have led me to call CMSs the devil’s handmaiden. But suffice it to say, they are even more toxic when they convince others of their position. They will say with great authority in their voice, “All you need is a good content management system.” Ministers and Board Presidents are particularly vulnerable to such authoritative nonsense.

I’ve actually had to back several groups out of CMSs, including one very large one. By large, I mean thousands of pages. It was incredibly expensive for them to do this (much more expensive than the initial costs), and they chose to return to a mostly static site. But two years later they are still happy.

The heart of the issue here isn’t whether CMSs are inherently good or bad. It’s the extremes. As with most things in life, the middle way holds the key. Use a CMS wisely, and it’s a beautiful thing. They can make the difference between having a website or not. Or they can enhance a healthy site. However, I expect I’m preaching to the choir here, since blog software is arguably a stripped down, highly focused type of CMS.

In the final analysis, what really matters is your site and its stakeholders. What will work best for them, if anything? Hint: there are no easy answers.

Why and Whither Drupal?

After doing fairly extensive research, I’ve concluded that for now, for my particular congregation, Drupal would be a helpful CMS to at least augment our website – particularly to build the community that’s already there.

We’ve got a fair number of geeks in the congregation, so if I set it up and am hit by a bus, someone else can continue to do the not inconsiderable backend work – securing and upgrading it in particular. It’s also open source, and the software itself costs nothing.

The other open source CMS I’ve played with is Joomla. I like it a lot too, but Drupal has been around longer, and I gravitate to the greater sense of stability. However, for me the biggest difference between the two is that Joomla starts out with lots of bells and whistles, while Drupal you build out with modules. The core program is quite simple.

Further whetting my Drupal appetite was Dan Harper’s call for “Unitarian Universalist geeks [to] commit themselves to maintaining a subset of Drupal” and Scott Well’s response.

Like Scott, I recently discovered and loved the Geeks and God podcast series about Drupal. I highly recommend them for church geeks considering or using Drupal. Alas, Geeks and God is going on a brief hiatus. But if you listen to later episodes (e.g. the most recent, which is excellent for other reasons), they sometimes have more Drupal hints.

In any event (drum roll) here is My Drupal Playground. I won’t guarantee that it will continue to work, since this is the place where I can be as bad as I want to be. While you could in theory subscribe to the feed, I’d advise against it. Even I’m not subscribing to it. I’m just using the blog to jot down quick notes to myself as I learn the peculiarities of Drupal.

One final note for other Drupal enthusiasts: Drupal 6 should be released in the next month or two. For a project like building a subset, we’d probably be better off to postpone getting serious until it’s out and we can assess it. But I, for one, am eager to get going. So happy Drupaling, y’all, and may some of us build something the rest of us can put to good use.