Just came across this – Drupal Gardens - http://www.drupalgardens.com/ Like Ning, but using Drupal. More like WordPress.com really, but using Drupal. Many people have a free website for their personal blog or business. Generally they opt for WordPress.com, Blogspot.com, Google Sites or just make do with a Facebook page these days. Drupal is an open source content management system that is very popular amongst web developers as it is easy to install, easy to learn and highly configurable. Like WordPress.org, you can bolt on modules (like plugins, add-ons etc) to enhance the site. If installed on your own domain it is a very powerful CMS. With Drupal Gardens there is a choice of themes, all the usual Drupal features – pages, stories, forum, plus gallery and comments. At the moment you cannot install extra modules. It seems a good place to build a free site, if you are into that sort of thing. I set up an experimental blog here: http://howtoloseweight.drupalgardens.com/ It took me about 30 minutes to set that up, although most of the time was spent writing the first blog post (and yes, I know that it has not been proof read and is full of grammatical errors). In fact, I wrote a [...]

I decided the other day to try out Joomla, as there are a couple of modules which I think may be useful for a couple of my portal sites. However, so far I have found Joomla! to be a little problematic. I have installed Drupal on several sites now, and always with no problems at all. Just FTP the files to the server, set up a MySQL database, then open the browser and navigate to the domain, and from there everything is straight forward. With Joomla things were not as simple. First of all I tried to install version 1.0.15 (full version) as this was the first one on the Joomla downloads page (I assumed that they had placed the latest stable release at the top of the list). I FTP’d it to my web host, and started to install it. Everything seemed to go fine, until I attempted to install a module. I navigated to the Administrator pages, then Installers > Modules. But I did not see the file browser box from here, just the same control panel menu with the 12 items (i.e. “Add New Content” to “Global config”). Not being able to install the one module that [...]

I have recently been playing around with Drupal, which is a free open source content management system. At first glance Drupal looks rather complicated, as there are many standard modules, even more optional modules that are developed by other users, plus a vast array of configuration settings, all of which make Drupal very customisable, but also complex. However, one of the great things about Drupal is that fact that once the files are uploaded to your server, it is very simple to get a basic website up and running. Drupal offers several content styles within its standard package, such as blogs, forums, stories, pages and books, plus the ability to import RSS syndicated feeds, to create new content automatically from other websites. Community and Collaborative Websites What makes Drupal special is that it is really geared for community and collaborative web sites. By default there are three user levels – Admin (by default the first account created is the admin account), Authorised (i.e. anyone that signs up / registers for the site) and anonymous (anyone viewing the site with no account). For each of these user levels access rules can be granted, for specific categories of content, and for specific [...]

There are so many open source CMS (content management systems) around these day, that a web designer no longer needs to build their own. However, building your own will have some advantages. Open source CMS’s include the likes of Joomla/Mambo, Drupal, Smarty and Pligg to name but a few. WordPress now also have a WPMU (word press multi user) so you can set up many blogs easily under one domain – but I was informed yesterday that Drupal can do all this OK. Using an existing content management system will give you one very big advantage: it will have a lot more features. However there are a couple of extremely important things that you need to ensure you get right up front: Does the system expose the features that you require without exposing too much? CMSs vary widely in their intended applications. For example there are systems designed for completely open access (such as wikis), systems designed to be read-only except by admin users, systems that mandate particular structures, systems that allow you to structure things however you like, systems that provide user management, systems that don’t, systems that give each user private content areas, systems that don’t, etc… It [...]