My Experience with Drupal 5.5

In mid February 2008 I decided to act upon an idea that I had been giving serious thought to. The idea I had was for a website. Excited at the prospect of breathing life into an idea like millions before me, I registered a domain, got a hosting account and magically I had internet presence. Right?

Wrong!

In the early days of the internet and to this day in varying degree, a person could scrape together a few lines of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and as if by magic, call it a website. Today however, things are much more complex. There are many facets to building a website and as many languages to program sites as there are fingers on my hands. So how can a person survive in the complex world of administering their personal website?

Drupal.

I have been working half-heartedly with Drupal 5.5 now for just over 8 weeks as of this writing. The first 6 weeks were dedicated to installing, deleting and reinstalling the software and databases 3 times. I have spent hours on the phone with technical support. After all was said and done, it seems that my hosting provider did not have some key settings correct. So with those fixed, I should have been well on my way to administering my site. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It seems that my philosophy of taking the product out of the box, throwing  the instructions away and figuring it out on your own, does not work well with Drupal. I’ve had to UNLEARN my entire way of  doing things. It has served me well in the past, but in regards to content management systems, it is an epic fail!

My first lesson learned: It would be wise to sit down with paper and pencil and flowchart or at least sketch the form you would like your website to take on.  I tried to skip this step and found myself creating menus and more menus to navigate my site only to have them report 404 (page not found) because there were no content pages for the menus to point to.

The way I should have started was to create the pages of content *first*, then build the menu’s later. Drupal is more like a puzzle, where parts come together to make it whole. I’ve had to learn a whole new set of terms. Taxonomy, blocks, modules, aggregation, views, RSS and many more. Some parts of this puzzle do not play well with other parts. www.drupal.org has extensive modules and documentation to support them, but I still find myself floundering.

Just how Drupal is supposed to make my website design easier is still a mystery to me. I have lost countless hours sleep, building and rebuilding menu hierarchies, installing modules, views and themes as well as pages of content only to lose them *somewhere*.

This week I have made more progress than ever before. I have installed a new theme called Newsflash from www.roopletheme.com. I am viewing video tutorials, reading help faqs, and getting one-on-one help from some new found friends as well as old school trial and error. Things are becoming a little bit clearer as to the inner workings of this beast, but I would not say that ‘ease of use’ is Drupals strong suit.

I have so may more ideas and every day I lose more sleep trying to get them out of my head. I’d like to launch the site soon, so that one day you may even get to see my unique outlook on how an average homeowner sees the future of living green, saving money, alternative energy, solar power, wind power, DIY, and much, much more. If you would like to stop by, view my progress, or just say hello,  check out www.greenerhomeowner.com but be kind since it is a work in progress.