It's still pretty early in dev, but I'm now about 10 hours of tweaking into my new drupal blog.
For really bad web devs such as myself, two options exist for creating personal websites -- blogs, and content management systems. Blogs are generally designed for a specific blogging purpose, and are typically hard to expand into full blown content-rich sites. CMSs are usually designed to be able to do, well, anything. Through plugins, most of the big ones include blogs, forums, galleries, chat, and anything else under the sun through extensions. There isn't much of a middle ground between these choices. While CMS almost always have some sort of blogging function, it's not the main purpose, and they usually kinda suck. Blogs are about as extensible as a large furry dog, yet are really good for blogging (no duh). For the past week or so, I was looking for either a blog with CMS extensability, or a CMS with really good blogging. I have found it, by the famous name of Drupal. From what I understand, Drupal started out as yet another PHP blog. A community developed around it, and it is now a full blown CMS, with most of the bells and whistles of Joomla or PHP-Nuke. Although there comparatively aren't many of them, Drupal's extensions and themes are high quality and easy to write or modify. My new site is going up at drupal.benplaut.org, and i'm currently having a grand time messing with various modules to make them as useful as possible. Planned for my site:
DDEV is the official local development tool of Drupal. And like Drupal, DDEV depends on the support of the open source community.
