Testing Drupal

Our task last week was to come up with at least 4 CMS that we might be able to use for our Kukui Cop Dorm Energy Competition. We have managed to come up with the following four CMS: Joomla, Drupal, DotCMS, and SilverStripe. After some considerations, I have decided to work on creating a mock up page of Drupal.

Using Drupal I would have to say was very difficult. The user interface of the system was very unintuitive, at least for me, at first and it took me couple of days to figure out how everything works. I would have say though, once I got used to the system, it is actually pretty useful and powerful CMS.

I first started by creating a very simple mock up page of the Kukui cup system with HTML tables and lists. This was easy enough as all I needed to do was to hard code everything into the body of the page. My next task was to figure out whether we can actually use this CMS to do what we need to do for our actual project. It was very simple to figure out how to get the Google Gadgets to work with Drupal. The main problem I had with Drupal was that it took me a very long time to figure out how to insert multiple modules into a single page, i.e. frontpage. It turns out that I needed to use a separate module called pannel to achieve this. After figuring the above out, rest seemed quite straightforward.

I am starting to get used to using Drupal; however, the sheer amount of problems I ran into while trying to get this CMS to work still makes me look back at Joomla. This week's task is to determine our CMS of choice. This maybe a difficult task.