That’s right, I’ve drupaled. If you don’t know what drupal is go here: drupal.org
The two second summary is that drupal is an open-source content management framework (CMF) for setting up and maintaining community-type websites. It has built in features for managing discussion groups, image galleries, community blogs, stories, upcoming events, basically anything you need to host a site where a group of people will contribute the content. Content that people can add and others can modify and enrich.
It is written using php and is, more or less, a community version of wordpress. It essentially has the same concepts in place (themes, modules, plugins, security, etc. etc.) but geared towards multiple user content. WordPress is great for individual blogging but not so good for communities. Drupal is great for community hosting but not so great on blogging although it does have a blogging feature.
Admittedly it gets a site up and running very quickly but, like I’ve discovered with all of these open-source frameworks, for the site to be slick and just the way you want it you have to go into the code and hack it up. For example, the forums module is pretty vanilla out of the box so for it to behave like a respectable forum it needs to be beefed up.
The good news about drupal which holds true for wordpress is that there is a massive amount of user support out there. If there’s something you need it’s most likely out there on the web. The downside is, at least with drupal, it’s friggin’ hard to sift through all the sites to find exactly what’s needed. I.e. I found it easier to hack up the stuff myself. I found wordpress communities to be far more elaborate and tidy. Very easy to find stuff for wordpress.
Anyway, enough geeky blah blah. Why did I drupal all over myself anyway? Well, ever since I placed a link on my blogsite to a palce called ‘Wonderboy’, I’ve had a heck of a time figuring out where the link should go. For the 2 years I’ve been blogging I’ve attended 2 Wonderboys and have struggled with how or even if I wanted to publish anything about the event and my experiences. I took a half-assed very poor shot at it by creating a page for the link that had some vague garbage about the events and a lame explanation of the spirit of Wonderboy. In a nutshell, my attempt was a blemish on the integrity of Wonderboy and justice was NOT being served.
So, what better way to express the glory of Wonderboy than to dedicate a site to it’s existance and the valiant participants of this hallowed event. Why not leave it to the wonderboys as a whole to divulge the true spirit and comraderie of Wonderboy?
An opportunity came up when one of the committee heads proposed that Wonderboy continue its exploration into the 21st century by leveraging the WWW to its advantage. No more paper and pen and snailmail and (yawn) normal ole’ group emails. Let’s get with it.
So after a little back-and-forth with the heads of state, I volunteered my hosting site and then went out and purchased a very special domain for our very own. I then discovered through Fantastico (cPanel stuff) that my site has drupal all ready to go at the click of a button. Thanks to my wordpress endeavours my site was already good to go for drupal. Also, thanks to the awesomeness of my hosting site, I can easily plug in many add on domains (I currently host micheldesroches.com, my wife’s name .com (for privacy reasons I won’t divulge that) and now, drumroll please……………….www.thewonderboy.org
Why .org you ask? Because there’s not much out there available for wonderboy. The nerve of some people. All of the www.wonderboy.* were taken except for some obscure ones that are too embarrassing or stupid to use.
At any rate, check it out! It’s very new. So new in fact that only a few of the wonderboys are aware of it, all of the data is test data and there’s no real content pertaining to Wonderboy up there yet EXCEPT for that picture of the log cabin. That is the home of the annual Wonderboy. The boys below are shovelling off part of the lake for a rousing mid-February shinny during breaks between the gruelling Wonderboy events. I’ve disabled many of the features that drupal provides because most of the wonderboy participants are web 1.0 alpha users: i.e. they barely know how to use email.
Now, that Wonderboy link in my left menu bar actually goes to a real place that is only bound to get better.