Drupal 6.2 - DON'T Do It This Way!

While that might sound like an admonition or the title that would intro a disastrous experience with Drupal it is actually the opposite.

Ryan and I conceived of http://dontdoitthisway.com a few weeks ago and sometime around Midnight on Wednesday we decided to build it out. We spent three hours that night and about 5 hours the next afternoon and it was 95% done.

We have only been building with Drupal 6.2 (and Joomla 1.5) for the past month plus as a team and me only for about 7 weeks, so total it took us 16 hours (8 hours x the 2 of us) to get it to what you would call a beta level. That included customizing the template, finding and researching the appropriate modules, testing all those modules and fine tuning some of the settings.

It does not include the time we spend rebuilding the whole thing again because we accidentally were both working on the back end on the only admin account which basically ended up screwing up the permissions and created a validation error. BUT the rebuild only took about 4 1/2 hours). And hat off to the guys at Rochen our hosting company who tried help with a rollback in record response time. Those guys are awesome.

So the end result is a site that takes about 6-8 third party modules (including social networking, commenting, comment rating, and image modules) and (so far) spins like a top. We did luck out with SUPER template (Alek 2.0, I think) that is well organized, informative and easy to customize (at least on the code site, no real customizablity on the back end/admin side).

This is case-in-point what I have been talking about in the Joomla vs. Drupal posts. The same site built in Joomla would have take at least twice the time if for not other reason than the menu setups and structure would have taken hours.

Long story short, Kudoz to the Drupal 6.2 core and even more Kudoz to the developers of Drupal modules. I really like Joomla but his experience definitely broadened our respect and consideration for using Drupal for sites that need robust functionality and a quick turnaround (and minimal visual customization).

Other lesson learned: Confidence in the Modules is critical!