Drupal is cool

by Sapphire (July 18, 2005)

I know I talked about using Mambo on something, but I opted for Drupal instead. You can see it in action at my new directory/articles site, ChillyCool. My main reason was, I kept reading about how SEO-friendly Drupal was. And they’re right.

Getting Drupal to generate static urls in place of dynamic ones is incredibly easy - there’s a button you click. It leaves your outbound links unscripted and spiderable so that they’re valuable to your link partners. And after launching over the weekend, on Monday morning I found that Google had already indexed four pages.

Beyond all that, Drupal seems incredibly stable. It’s also powerful, which is both good and bad. I’m still overwhelmed by the features and possibilities, and I suspect I’m misusing some of them. But the toughest thing to figure out is how to set up your categories for content. Drupal uses terms like “vocabulary”, “taxonomy” and “category” like other sites use “topic”, “category” and “subcategory”. It seems unecessarily confusing to me, but I think it allows for some revolutionary ways to sort your content, if you know what you’re doing. I unfortunately, don’t. But I can play with the features I do understand until I figure it out.

People complain that Drupal is hard to install. It was for me, the first few times I tried it. I always ended up using the Fantastico install, then having problems with that. This time, I actually got it installed easily. The modules and themes are a snap to install, except for a few that involve downloading files from other sites and making strange changes. But you just have to follow the instructions - and if the instructions are inadequate, there’s not much you can do.

You can watch the ChillyCool site as it progresses to see what all I manage to do with Drupal.

Posted in Tools
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