Not having a wonderful time with Drupal. Dug a great hole, leapt into it, with great travail and the aid of some last-semester techno-friends, climbed back out. I have a way with problems beyond my current ability to solve, and Drupal offered a number of open doors straight to them. At one point I declared “I’M A PROGRAMMER NOT A WEB DESIGNER” and on some simpleheaded level this may be true but what I meant was, stop making my crazy with both the websense and the programmersense. I found that Drupal required both sensibilities which is, I believe, why I went briefly to crazy world. Trying to figure out if the problem at hand, say, needing to create the node for an image before attaching it to my mosaic node, was superficial or complex took a lot of system resources. Or which content was spoken of as external-linkable. Or how the entirety of views_slideshow works. The good news is that I sure have the hang of downloading, unpacking, and installing the modules. I figure any Linux experience is good Linux experience. And I’m grateful for the problems, only because they seem fixed now, and before that because I had to rifle around for tools to help me out. Though I was warned it wouldn’t help, I found phpMyAdmin my best friend sorting out users relative to roles, and ESPECIALLY in locating, by lost-user-ID-number, some dead and orphaned content that was haunting my site.
However. I loved being introduced to Drupal and would love to play more, with guidance. I think it’s an entirely appropriate setting for my collection on mosaics and is value-added relative to any and all websites I have attempted in the past. It could actually encourage me to build the site, to seek content, to enhance content, to organize content, in a way that Dreamweaver does not. It is collection-aware, and it’s the first software I’ve experienced of its kind. I’d like to find out what Drupal regulars feel is the “average” learning curve, or whether Drupal “drop-ins”, infrequent users or one-time-project users, can quantify their learning curve.
Difficult and praiseworthy both is Drupal, but not huge degrees of difference from this setting, WordPress. I still have learning to do here, could potentially mount at least an exhib of mosaics here, with some web content, some text…
greenleopard reporting in from DigIn 