Drupal

Drupal 6 RC2 was released yesterday.  And, I must also say that the more familiar I have become with Drupal 6, my previous opinion that building Drupal themes is not as straightforward as building Joomla! templates has mellowed quite a bit.

Why the change of heart, you ask?  Read on to find out...

Drupal 6 RC1 was released on 21 December.  The last Beta (4) was fairly stable so maybe it won't be too long until a Drupal 6 stable release hits the streets.  I think there's a good chance that the Drupal 6 and Joomla! 1.5 stable releases might occur within weeks (or maybe days) of each other.

I've been fooling with both Joomla! 1.5 and Drupal 6 for quite a while now.  Both are significant improvements over their predecessors.  For example, Joomla! 1.5 has made significant improvements in their SEF implementation and intoduced template overrides; Drupal has made significant improvements in caching and has also simplified theming.  Buildng Drupal themes is still not as straight forward as templating in Joomla!, but this lastest release takes a big step in the right direction.

Congrats to both the Drupal and Joomla! core teams for making my two favorite CMS's even better!

Today, Packt Publishing announced that Drupal was the winner of its annual Overall Open Source Content Management System Award for 2007.  

Joomla!, which was last year's winner in this category, placed second in the voting and also won the Best PHP Open Source Content Management System category award.  Drupal garnered second place in that one.

I've been a Joomla! user since the project's inception and have been using Drupal now for the better part of a year.   It's nice to see both of them recognized for their contributions to the open source community and to the IT community at large.

This is probably a no-brainer for hard-core Drupal theme designers, but for the common folk who are not intimately familiar with the innards of Drupal and the subtleties of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), I suspect this might be quite useful.

Have you ever wondered why many Drupal themes use the standard menu formatting even though they may be radically different in many other ways?  Well, based on my personal experiences with Drupal themes, I suspect the following may explain why this happens in a lot of cases.

I don't know how many times I've tried to give the menus a different look by fooling with the CSS and ended up frustrated and perplexed when the changes did not "take."  It seems I could never get the menus to look like I expected them to.  There were always problems getting the menu views to look the same in both Firefox (FF) and Internet Explorer (IE).  The majority of the time, the changes gave the expected results in FF but there were always problems with IE.  Bullets and icons were never positioned as expected and sometimes would not appear at all.  Tweaking the margin and padding values to get the desired result in IE would invariably cause layout problems in FF.

I joined the Drupal Association today.  The cost of membership is $30.00 US or so, depending on the exchange rate between the Euro and the US Dollar.  Membership doesn't get you much except for one important thing...the knowledge that you have at least given back something in appreciation of all the work involved in producing an excellent (and free) CMS software package that makes one's life a lot easier when creating web sites with dynamic content.