Finishing up Milstone 1

We are about to complete the first stage of our project. As I have mentioned before, our goal for this initial stage was to determine which CMS is best suited for the Dorm Energy Competition system, also known as the Kukui Cup Competition.

After some considerations, I have decided to test out Drupal, not only because I was quite unfamiliar with the system, but also because I simply wanted to try something that was new to me. Getting Drupal to work was not easy. I certainly do understand why so many on the Internet complain about this CMS's high learning curve. It does take a lot of patience and effort to really get the hang of this system. Drupal at a glance, does seem a bit underpowered compared to that of the competitors such as Joomla. I was surprised to learn that the initial installation of Drupal does not include modules such as "View" or "Page". These modules are used so frequently that I believe they should be included in Drupal's initial installation. Just the fact that some of the modules, are missing from the initial settings does make this CMS seem a bit more difficult to understand at first.

For the first milestone of this project, I created a basic mock up page to demonstrate the ability of Drupal so that we can then determine which CMS deserves the spot.

The prelogin page was fairly easy to create once I got the hang of using modules such as "page" and "view". The page is basically separated into two sections using the page module, and I inserted the content into each of the two sections with the help of the "view" module. Both the contents, the youtube video and the calendar are simply inserted into the content in html format.

The Kukui Cup page was a different story. For a strange reason, I was not able to simply embed the Google Gadget code into the content of the webpage. Doing so would result in HTML 502 Error. I was not able to resolve this issue unfortunately. I was; however, able to get around this problem by instead embedding the Google Gadget code into the block itself (without using the content module). This caused this particular page to be less flexible and more difficult to work with.

Although Drupal may be difficult to work with at times, its function as CMS is still superb. I would say that we still have quite a ways before deciding on our CMS of choice.