Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Drupal CMS

I got involved in a project for building a web application to do some data management and was looking at a framework for it. Having heard about drupal at several places, I thot of trying it out. It was really good and simple. Installation didnt take much time on Linux or Mac. You just need the base framework of Apache, PHP and mysql. After downloading the drupal project files, copy them to Apache root directory and access drupal from Apache. Now when you access for the first time, you'll be guided through a web-based installation process which is like 4 steps or so.
I was amazed at the modules and themes that have been written for drupal. There are atleast 1000 modules (modules are nothing but small applns or components) and themes. A forum, blog, polling application and many more modules comes in by default. so if you want to a forum on your drupal based site, you just have to enable it.
IBM developerworks has some good articles on writing custom modules for drupal. I havent played much with it but at a glance from this article, it looks a bit overwhelming. I guess once we get a hang of the jargons and concepts, it might look simple. But overall, it was good to know abt a CMS which provides built-in support for many common functionalities of a web application (like login, menus, blog etc..)

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