By cameron@www.bales.ca on

Harold Jarche and I have written a review of Drupal commisioned by Business Blog Consulting. The reviews Rick is posting seem to be getting a fair amount of traffic and interest. Hopefully lots more people will consider and adopt Drupal after reading this review. Since Harold and I are just two people we may have written some things that some of you may feel are a bit off base - feel free to send us comments and or comment on Rick's site.

Comments

Boris Mann’s picture

Boris Mann commented

I posted a really long commentary. I do appreciate you and Harold writing the review. I've been a) really busy and b) figured it was somewhat inappropriate for me to write the review.

What did I get out of the review? Lots of things to make easier and tweak so they're even more fantastic and more powerful. That, and make it clear that Drupal is waaay more than just blogging. The developer community here knows that, but for people who are just wrapping their heads around blogging and how powerful it can be, everything that Drupal supports can be overwhelming. Not difficult, but mind blowing in a kind of "you mean it supports event calendars too!?" way.

Gunnar Langemark@www.langemark.com’s picture

Gunnar Langemark@www.langemark.com commented

I reacted to the review, but want to add here, that I think it was an excellent review, and that a trustworthy review will have both pros and cons. I think that commenting on this review, and proving the cons wrong is the way to go.
:-)

I aslo want to add that since it is about Business use of blogs, the review might have gone into more detail in this respect. AFAIK Michael Angeles has done a lot of work in that area.

Dropping in from Langemarks Cafe.

hjarche’s picture

hjarche commented

Thanks Gunnar. I'll look into Michael Angeles' work - we learn through our conversations!

hjarche’s picture

hjarche commented

Rick Bruner has asked a few more questions but there are two that I can't figure out:

1. "Does it support categories? If so, how about hiearchical categories (e.g., Movies / Horror, Movies / Comedies, Movies / Thriller, Books / Fiction, Books / Biographies, and so on)? What about surpressed categories? (That is, in the monthly archive, publish all except the "Breaking News" category)?" [I can't find an answer to the Suppressed Categories" part]

2. Does it let you easily create a "remaindered links" blog-within-a-blog, a la Anil Dash's Links Blog? (Obviously, you can kludge this in most systems, but I'm wondering if some blog software has it off the shelf.) [anybody know about this?]

Any pointers appreciated.

Steven’s picture

Steven commented

1) Taxonomy is what you need. It supports multiple hierarchies (a term having more than one parent). In 4.5, you can do hierarchical queries out of the box through urls (e.g. taxonomy/term/1/all displays all nodes with term 1 or one of term 1's children).
Surpressed categories is not a feature we current have, but you could do 'taxonomy/term/1+2+3+4+6' if you have 6 terms and term 5 is the one you want to surpress. Of course, an easier syntax would be nice. Still, you can alias such a URL to a nicer path like 'archive'.

2) I have no idea what you mean with this.

One thing I missed in the review is a more in-depth explanation of Drupal's module system. You only mention in a couple of places that modules exist or can be used. One of Drupal's (IMO important) traits however is that modules are first-class citizens and many of the core features are implemented as modules which can be disabled if you don't need them.
In many CMSes (and programs in general), plug-ins are things tacked on later which can never be as integrated and as flexible as the standard stuff.

Also, you use the phrasing "this should be fixed in the upcoming 4.5". To me (I'm a non-native English speaker though), this sounds like "this is something the develepers should work on for the next version" rather than "this is something that has been fixed in the upcoming 4.5".

hjarche’s picture

hjarche commented

Steven: I appreciate your knowledgeable advice. I've referred to your post, and will ensure that I spread the word on how modules are integrated into the Drupal development process, and not just afterthoughts. Thanks for educating me - I'm an end-user, not a developer ;-)

Boris Mann’s picture

Boris Mann commented

1. Yes, it does hierarchical categories. Suppressed categories doesn't make any sense -- the way I would implement this in Drupal would be to have a "breaking news" vocabulary assigned to stories, and stories only. Blogs would have a separate vocab, and some of them would get promoted to the front page.

A lot of people don't seem to get the distinction between "blog" and "story" -- more use cases and scenarios are needed for this.

2. Yes, the weblinks module. Or you could use the del.icio.us module.

Gunnar Langemark@www.langemark.com’s picture

Gunnar Langemark@www.langemark.com commented

It's a little arrogant to dismiss it don't you think?
If you have 100 categories and one is "private" for instance. Some people would like to see everything you publish - except the private stuff. So now you need to write 99 categories in your URL.....

Dropping in from Langemarks Cafe.

Boris Mann’s picture

Boris Mann commented

I didn't meant to dismiss the idea of suppressed categories (re-reading my post it may have come across like that). The thing is, the concept of "supressed categories" is a very tool-centric phrase, stemming from a lack of information of what the base desire.

Essentially, the question should have just been "Does the tool support a way to suppress posts from being included in the archive?"

And even that is vague. In Drupal, does this mean un-publishing it after a certain period of time? That would be a way to do it, as would the way that I mentioned.

Hope that clears things up,

-- Boris

Gunnar Langemark@www.langemark.com’s picture

Gunnar Langemark@www.langemark.com commented

I may even agree that we don't need a lot more hard to understand concepts in standard Drupal right now.

We still need to make it easier.

Dropping in from Langemarks Cafe.

cameron@www.bales.ca’s picture

cameron@www.bales.ca commented

Rick posted some more questions so Harold and I supplied some more answers - you may want to check out the review again since we may have made more mistakes.

http://www.businessblogconsulting.com/2004/09/drupal_blog_pub.html