We use Drupal for a lot of stuff in our group at PSU. From our Liquid ANGEL project to Podcasts at Penn State, Drupal is being put through the paces all the time. I have friends who have gone to Drupal for their blogging platform and more and more people I know are getting into the act. We used Drupal a couple of years ago when we did blogging for the Governor’s School, the blogs@si project, and IST2U.
That’s a long intro paragraph just to point to the fact that Drupal is getting a whole new installation process with some nice features — the coolest one the ability to easily create custom distributions. At any rate, Drupal is getting better (and easier).
Hey Cole-
Just read the stuff on Liquid ANGEL and I definitely agree with what you’re saying. I agree that putting a blog into ANGEL isn’t key – it’s getting stuff OUT of ANGEL that is more important. I realized that I probably spend most of my time on the web on gmail, google, and bloglines, and then jumping off from there. I think if ANGEL integrated into these open source type technologies it would be so much more useful. For instance (and I’m not sure if any of this is included already), what if any changes to ANGEL were available via RSS? And how about publishing ANGEL calendars to the iCal standard?
Cole – Drupal’s getting better (seemingly) every day. 4.7 is really solid and flexible – I wouldn’t have recommended widespread adoption of 4.6 – and 4.8 is going to rock. The install profiles are going to be great for any institutions managing lots of Drupal sites (like, say UCalgary or BCIT)…
Now, if only there was a single admin control panel to manage settings and updates for all sites on a server… When there’s an update, I have to log into each site as “admin” and run update.php manually, which is a pain. And won’t scale to hundreds/thousands of sites easily…
Cole – I stumbled on your blog a few days ago and already you have posted something of relevance to me. Our institution just installed Drupal last week. We had it in mind for one project and realing how easy it can be customized, decided we can use it for three projects – saving us months of time. It is a great tool.
Just tried the installer in the CVS HEAD branch. It works great! It doesn’t create the database for you, but it will populate it at will, and enables modules as specified in the profile. Very handy…