Drupal novice

While reading about Drupal, I came across many sites that compare Drupal to Joomla! and WordPress. I mentioned earlier that I had no experience with regards to web CMS, so I decided to check both of them out. This time, instead of downloading the distribution and installing manually, I decided to do things the quick way by downloading complete application stacks through BitNami.

BitNami's application stack lets me run a complete web application using a simple installer program. They also offer ready-to-run virtual machines images ("virtual appliances") if I don't want to install the stack into my OS. The virtual appliance includes its own Linux distribution, and the application stack pre-installed and ready to run.

I mentioned in my first Drupal post that getting Drupal up and running took less than an hour. Getting both Joomla! and WordPress up and running, using the BitNami stack, took less than 10 minutes, including the download time.



Both Joomla! and WordPress do seem easier to get started for most people. At least, they both came with WYSIWYG editors built in, and have nice friendly administrative menus without having to install a module like the admin module or the admin menu module like in Drupal. I don't know, maybe it's my old Unix background, but I found Drupal's standard menus faster and easier to use than fancy icons.




Anyway, what's better for learning than trying to build an actual project? I'm still feeling guilty over last year's blunder (though not my fault at all) on recommending an e-commerce site for my friend's website. So I decided to rebuild the site for her, using Drupal.