I have been working with Drupal for a couple of months now. For those of you who don’t know, Drupal is a content management system (CMS). What makes this different than something like WordPress? Well, WordPress was built as a blogging engine. With the use of plug-ins and alterations WordPress can also be used as a CMS. However, Drupal was built as a CMS from the ground up.

What does Drupal do?
The name “content management system” gives you an idea of what it does. Blogs are like a long roll of posts. These posts can be categorized using tags and such. Drupal lets you categorize using your own taxonomy. This allows for easier sorting of articles. In the abstract, this does not make a lot of sense.

Here is an example. An online newspaper would have numerous sections like sports, entertainment, etc. Let’s say you have a star athlete that is going to be appearing in a movie. The writer would write the article and could categorize the article as both sports and entertainment. When a reader goes into the entertainment section, the reader will see the article. When the reader goes to the sports section the article will appear there as well. One post can appear in numerous sections.

Drupal is also used by the good people at TWiT.tv. Drupal is used to create sites for shows and organizes all of the content on TWiT. Drupal can also be used to blog if you want.

How I Use Drupal
I use Drupal to run FiniteComedy.com. FiniteComedy.com produces audio and video podcasts. I wanted something that let me post a show on the front page and that same post would appear under the show page. I also wanted the ability to group all video episodes together or audio episodes together. Drupal allows me to put together various pages like one for each show, a random video page, a random audio page, an all videos page and much more.

Again, you do similar things with WordPress, but there’s a saying about turning a refrigerator into a boat – I can’t remember it. The point of the saying is that it’s better to use a tool designed for what you are doing than trying to adapt something to your purpose.

Drupal has plugins called “modules.” If you want to do anything like what I’m doing, you’re going to need a module called “Views.” Just make sure that your module is compatible with the version of Drupal you have. If you use something like Fantastico to install Drupal, an upgrade will wipe out your modules. I learned this the hard way. Additionally, later versions of Drupal do not work well with modules or themes designed for older versions.

Community
Drupal has an excellent support structure with tons of information and tutorials out there. Unfortunately, some of these tutorials are geared towards those who have a familiarity with Drupal. Simply messing around in Drupal will not yield great results unless you are just trying to put together a blog. Using Drupal as a blog tool is very much overkill. Many of the tutorials are incredibly useful and will help you get on your way to using Drupal.

Themes
The vast majority of free Drupal themes are incredibly utilitarian and lack the flair of the multitude of WordPress themes out there. If you are handy with CSS, you can put together a nice new theme. I would recommend taking an existing theme and messing with the CSS until it better fits your site. FiniteComedy.com needs an overhaul and we’re just using a free theme called “Wabi.”

Alternatives to Drupal
Other CMS’s available are Joomla and Mambo. I know very little about these alternatives other than they are free. Joomla is based on Mambo. As I’ve mentioned before, WordPress can be used as a CMS with some work. You can see an article about that here.