Migration to Drupal

Hi everyone. Over the years, iandouglas.com has changed from static page content, managed by hand or in Dreamweaver, to a handful of CMS systems, back to a homemade CMS with a poorly implemented template system, back to various third-party CMS software, to a slick design in Symfony for a while, back to the last number of attempts: Geeklog to WordPress to e107 to SilverStripe, and now to Drupal.

I've tinkered with Drupal since one of the version 4 releases and didn't care for it at the time. Frankly, I'm at a point where I don't really care any more which CMS I use, I just need something that's going to be easy to use, gives me the flexibility to add modules for my needs as an open-source developer offering support, and allows users to give me feedback on the site while blocking spam.

I honestly thought that SilverStripe was going to be the answer. In the two months I've played with it, I've found more bugs and irritations than I've found reasons to keep it and use it. Frankly, with the new job at Rubicon Project and 3 hours of commuting to soon be replaced with frantic packing and moving, and wanting to run ads from Rubicon Project on an XHTML setup without breaking, I just don't have time to trace through code or continue to be a pest on freenode IRC chatting in #silverstripe asking the guys for help. Again. Le sigh.

Drupal has been around and is a very mature platform. The only thing I already know is going to suck major-big-time is that any modules I write for v6 will be instantly broken when I upgrade to v7. I totally get that they don't want the baggage of backward compatibility to drag down the speed of the platform, so I'll just have to limit the modules I install (or write).

Anyhow, since I need to learn yet another database layout, it's going to take a while to pull up all of my old blog articles and pull them into Drupal. And given that Drupal won't have native tag support (yet allows for a native search function), so that'll take some getting used to.

I'm excited as well that Drupal v6 has a number of SEO-rich features built into it. It will be interesting to see whether I can get over the 4/10 GoogleRank that I've been at for years and years.