Inside the Fold

A few years ago I had no idea what a content management system was.

I had heard of this mysterious term and it is self-explanatory to a point but then there is this grey area.

Within the grey area begins the search. My current search is driven by a recent development at work, to develop a website that will allow one of our publishing groups to reach out to and build a community around Food and Drink content.

The request is no more than a few weeks old but I have just recently been included and now I am searching. Up until this point I used Wordpress as the CMS for both static sites and as a blogging engine.

After I heard of the new initiative my first thoughts were that the site would be the equivalent of running three to four blogs simultaneously. This was a gut reaction and now I am researching this feeling for more clarity.

As for a very preliminary and general description of the sites functionality here is the scoop!

Do you want to know more about the site plans? Have you done similar research? Share your thoughts here.

Have you heard of this one? The logo is a humanized water drop. The software was developed by Dries Buytaert originally as a bulletin board system an went open source in 2001.

The word drupal is the English translation for the Dutch word “druppel,” which means “drop,” like water drop.

Dries wanted to call the bulletin board site “dorp” meaning “village” as a reference to the community aspects of the software platform.

From what I gather Drupal is a bit more complicated out of the box than Joomla! or Plone but it offers much more extensive and sophisticated functionality. As its popularity grows efforts are continually made facilitate its usage by communities ranging from designers to the advanced developers.

Do you have any experience with this framework as a designer/beginner programmer? Please add your comments.