I just wanted to begin with a short thank-you for the work that's already been done on this impressive CMS. I've been working with *phpNuke for a little more than a year, however even with the eventual release of 6.5, I find there's still a lot I wish Nuke could do that can't be done without substantial modification. I've been pouring over the package and it's add-ons the last couple of days and learning to use them and I'm impressed by the flexibility and overall organization, not to mention a level of minimalism that's quite refreshing after a year of playing with Nuke and it's descendants.

*Shrug* Even if I find some glaring issue that completely prevents me from putting the package into production on my site, it's worth saying that I still would have had a great time just tinkering with the software and learning to use it (and I don't really see any glaring issues lurking around the corner). This is the coolest re-thinking of the "dynamic content management system" I've come across since I first got Nuke to work, so many months ago.

And credit where it's due: I still like Nuke a great deal and wouldn't hesitate to use it again under different circumstances. It just seems to be headed in a direction that's leaving me behind these days. ;(

Comments

kika’s picture

Thanks for kind words. I presume many can say "ah, just forget the PHPNuke, it is piece of spagetti code", but I'm more interested about 'Nuke's strong points. There are some degree of user-firendliness what Drupal lacks.

You as a 'Nuke user, can you point of these? What are the features in PHPNuke what you miss in Drupal?

There must be some, looking at the ernomous popularity of the toolkit Only local images are allowed.

Max Bell’s picture

This is a partial list, not so much of what I miss as what I see 'missing'. I'll post more as I think of them. I tried to prioritize them a little, but just enough to distinguish what's important to me, personally, and stuff I didn't see an equivalent feature for right away.

Mail - I never did get this working right, but being able to set up webmaster@mydomain.etc and actually read and send mail from my site got high marks for the "gee whiz" factor.

News Letter - "The server is down. The hosting service sends it's love." "The server is up." "Guest admins please do not use the 'Newsletter' feature to spam our users. Etc."

Admin Control Panel - This is just a matter of organization, but I miss the visual quality of being able to see how the features were laid out and find what I needed accordingly.

Linking New Stories to Polls and vice versa, "Topic Graphics" - Niether of which are critical or anything I used too frequently. Even back in my modeming days, though, I was one of those people that drew pictures with theDraw or in ASCII with QED -- my first computer was a Mac, and it shows. Only local images are allowed.

Site Statistics (Browsers, Search Engine hits) - I know there are a lot of ways of keeping tabs on traffic, but Nuke's statistics feature introduced me to the whole idea and provided a sense of security that the site was actually doing something (and occasionally being noticed by search engines).

Database Optimization/Backup - another 'feel good' feature, but being able to back-up your database in a couple of clicks is a nice extra.

Delete Module from Control Panel - this I thought about because some of the add-ons I grabbed for Drupal I didn't figure out right away and wanted to remove and start over with. I also have an adapted "File Manager" module I use for general file stuff when I didn't want to fire up CuteFTP.

Banner Management - I don't actually use this, although I might later because I like pictures. I know it's important for some people that need or want advertising, though, and would definately encourage fleshing out this part because you'll want to accomodate all the free hosting services that will run it if you cut and paste thier spam into the user's site...

Private Journal Entries - User Journals are a feature introduced with Nuke 6 that I thought would never be used for anything and proved to be wildly popular for my users; people that never talk to anyone else on the site will keep journals. Some of them keep private entries. Why this is baffles me; it's no trouble (and far better from a community-building perspective) to convince people that trading a journal for a Blog is the way to go. I also worry that not being able to keep entries "private" might discourage some of them from writing as much when they find out it isn't possible.

Web-Link Management - just looked at the form for entering one and did not see where or if it'd wind up in a centralized listing. Really, it's completely trivial, but the form stands out (as does the present private message add-on) as "under featured" from other forms.

An image repository - there's not much image management now, really, and I notice a lot of stuff (like smileys between messaging and BBS', for example) are even redundant, but it seems like a good idea.

I'll revisit this again once I've had time to chew it over. Right now I've got a prototype running using Foxserve's win32 apache/etc. package just to let me play around with it; I've looked at most of the features (read the manual a few times, the developer's section, googled for sites with info about Drupal...) but I haven't added any 'test content' -- I'm curious to see how the 'main page' looks with various node types added and become familiar with weighting them to control the appearance. So I may have pointed out things I simply haven't found so far.

In closing, I wanted to note the feature that first attracted me to Drupal; the existence of anything resembling an upgrade path from Nuke. Actually, I could convert my existing database over to any other in my sleep, but I like the idea of there being a direct path between the two points and I think it'd be a strong selling-point for people looking to convert. I like some of Geeklog's features (particularly group-management) and it's so Nuke-like I've been expecting a conversion script for some time, but the request for someone to write one's been sitting there for a couple months, now, for example.

gene@csof.net’s picture

> An image repository...

There's an image module that allows you to upload pictures with some basic Imagemagick features (resize, crop, etc.) which generates really nice albums. Also, I think gallery is in the process of being implemented as a drupal module.

> Site Statistics ...

Have you seen the statistics module, or does it just not do enough for you?

> Web-Link Management

Again, check the modules for weblink.

> Admin Control Panel

There's a spiffy redesign of the admin panel coming up. Depending on how stable it is, try the CVS version for a sneak peak.

These are just the modules I know about first hand, there may be others that address items on your wishlist as well.

Max Bell’s picture

I didn't get the image module to work, although right now my prototype copy is running on a windows box instead of a server. This will change in the next day or so as I am going to add a copy of the version of Drupal I have running to my web server.

I'm used to doing everything completely mickey-mouse. I put my present web site together by getting nuke running on a win32 apache installation, copying the files to a zip drive, and uploading them to a server using an iMac. Now that I have my windows box on a cable modem, I'm still not quite over the "test everything locally" impulse.

The 'statistics' section I just noticed -- the referrer's link isn't noticable right away in contrast to which nodes are being read (especially since my copy has no referrers to speak of). Web links I still have not completely figured out -- when I clicked on 'Links' at the top of the page, for example, this drug me into the 'topic taxonomy' I'd set up for my example forums section. I'm sure it will make sense when I've played with it more.

I'm also new to the idea of CVS, so I haven't grabbed anything out of those sections, yet, although I have read some of them. There were a couple of instances where I'd installed modules or themes out of the CVS section in the downloads area and messed up my installation enough to warrant starting over, so I was a bit cautious about what I added after that. This said, I'll have to check out that module and see what it does...

szczym’s picture

Its amazing system. really. for one year i been running postnuke and im
happy with that but let me point what have really impressed me in
drupal according to other cms.
- its light. its slim. its tiny in size. that IS really big advantage.
- i found it as the very special tool made for special actions.
particularly i been looking for book module for 3 month and did not
get too fare: i was in need to set the platform for collaborative
waiting but NOT to set a huge portal and cut off its functionality.
- advanced site organization: in other cms its very had to get out of
preset structures of taxonomy and functionality - drupal seems to be
very flexible.

So, dear developers: drupal is functional and effective due to its
speciality. there is a LOT of systems that are able to menage content
but drupal is only one:
maybe its not so good idea to tray to make a tool for everything from
weblog to portal. nukes are for it.
maybe is better to explore the very special path of drupal...

Some short suggestions:
- short install instruction should be in package - i see that handbook
is an work in progress but short and clear install.txt is very useful.
- table prefix !!! its important due to many people have one database
or sharing space - its easy to over ride other tables since drupal is
using common names.
- maybe database file should be named mysql-drupal-4_1_0.sql
- bug in .mysql line 2 - that long comment dont go in....
- some sort of install script (like postnuke) with detection of
environment (like gallery)

thanx, its something i have been looking for long time...

Max bell: i like your writing.

Max Bell’s picture

scszym:

I agree. Niche-wise, I think Drupal would be ahead to appeal to developers in favor of the end user (note that I am not saying "instead of" the end user). When I found Drupal, I was just looking for an RSS reader I could tack into Nuke; nobody was doing them, everyone seemed to be building a CMS around thier reader instead. I'm equally opposed to feature-bloat. I have a FAQ that's actually written as 'Content' because I could never get Nuke's FAQ feature to work right (even when I broke down and just edited the tables in the database).

It makes sense to me to try and produce a good frame-work that would appeal to developers and let THEM create new features or port existing projects. If I were to focus on the end-user to any degree it would be to facilitate the creation of XHTML compliant content and try and do something meaningful with themes; a well-documented theme with an explanation of what it did would be considerably more than anyone's had to work with to date on ANY platform. I just got my head around getting stuff into tables, and now I find that the cool thing to do is create table-less themes (which makes sense; half of my users are still at 800x600 if I believe my own polls).

For the most part, I'd as soon my users didn't try to write their own mark-up at all. It'd let me focus on getting them to write separate synopsis/teasers and body text instead of just dumping everything into the first open field available. Instead I get to proof markup, spelling, grammer and even journalistic accuracy. I'm not sure what the answer is because I don't understand the issues that cause the problem, but the idea of giving a user an empty text field and saying "Here! You can write your HTML and text right in this box!" and then calling it a 'content management system' is something of an oxymoron. I guess it does at least cut the FTP client out of the loop.

bbcity’s picture

I'm in the process of moving my website from PHP-Nuke 6.0 over to Drupal 4, and I think Drupal rocks just due to it's intuitive, easy-to-read, easy-to-use nature. Plus the fact that it emulates Kuro5hin.org style using PHP just rocks.

I'm very impressed.