Mariusz Slonina

Many of us faced the problem of choosing right tool for creating personal/company web page. Many of us spent a lot of time of searching the Web for such a tool, forums, blogs etc. And after all, more or less successfull, you choose one solution.

And I choosed one solution, too.

Drupal, Markdown and Blueprint.

Why?

Drupal - it is not designed, I think, to be just simple CMS for blogs. It is designed to be much more. I created with Drupal Podaj Dalej web page, testing many solutions, combinations of Drupal default content types and cck field, image galleries etc. And I found it not to be easy to use, however, much more easier to learn that i.e. Plone. I tested also Wordpress, but I returned to Drupal for its configuration availabilities. Believe me or not, but Drupal, with all community is the best Open Source CMS at all.

One of capabilities of Drupal are external modules, which extends functionality of core, and allows you to do things, you can't even imagine. And if not - you can always write a module self. Thus, I think for taking from Drupal best, you need to have some basic konwledge of PHP, databases and Xhtml/CSS coding. If you have - you'll got very powerfull tool for website publishing.

There are also lacks of Drupal, or things, that, in the first sight looks as lacks. One of them is WYSIWYG editor, especially for non-advanced users, which want only to create text with images and publish.

For Podaj Dalej website, I tested almost all such content editors, and finally I hacked Drupal 5 Htmlarea module to work with new versions of Xinha and Drupal 6. I know, it is not the best solutions, but by tthe time of writing was the best.

For my homepage, I tested another approach - the Markdown syntax, and I found it very useful, and I will not (I think) change to sth else.

What about skinning Drupal, or rather theming? Well, themes I found on Drupal sites are not so speciall, and many of them are ugly for me. One of the best in my humble opinion is Burnt theme, which was my first theming starter. I used also Framework, but there is much more better solution, much more better theming starter. It is Blueprint, a port of css-framework.

Believe me or not, rather check this self - Blueprint allows you to coding faster and with built-in typography and grid css you don't even have to think about fonts, paddings, etc. Default setings will produce great simple theme, which not hard to extend.

This website were created maybe in 2 hours of coding at all:)

Much less coding than with Framework or Zen Garden starter kit, much less coding than hacking default Garland. Just try it! Remember, you will take full capabilities of Blueprint only when you have strong knowledge and experience in css coding.

Feel free with Drupal, Markdown and Blueprint! Enjoy!