Drupal

Recently I shared my thoughts on Drupal 7's new administrative interface on my companies blog. I wanted to share the post here as well.

Drupal 7 has finally been released after nearly 2 years of development. This latest version of the popular content management system boasts many great enhancements for both users and developers. Personally I am very impressed with the enhancements to the user experience in the administrative interface. This in my opinion was the weakest area of past Drupal releases.

Drupal 7 is in Alpha 1 release currently and isn't recommend for production sites. However, I'd like to give a quick walkthrough of the new administrative theme "Seven" as it will give you something to look forward to for the first completed release.

Before the release of Drupal 7 I was seriously considering a move to Wordpress. I installed a local copy and started poking around. I was really impressed with the CMS but was a bit overwhelmed with how much I was going to have to learn if I were to be a good Wordpress designer.

Within a few hours of playing around I had a really simple but very basic Wordpress theme up and running. But I knew that I was only beginning to harness all the features of the CMS. Then a question popped into my mind, should I give up on 2 years of Drupal experience and head down the road of mastering Wordpress?

I ultimately decided to stick with Drupal, mainly because of their latest release of D7. However, I wanted to share some advice for new web designers or anyone looking to learn a CMS. In the video I talk a bit about choosing a CMS and sticking with it, and why it is a good idea to do so.

Sorry for the low audio, this was recorded out doors on my iPhone.

I've been spending that last few days taking a close look at Drupal 7 and I have to say I'm blown away with the improvements. Over the next week or two I'll be moving my site over to D7 even though it isn't recommend in its current dev form.