Drupal Nirvana Achieved With Mom Exchange

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a screencap of my todo list last Holy Week for my Drupal powered site MomEx (yes I just use notepad. Am very unsophisticated that way):

With little x marks on the side to indicate they.are.now.finished.

Let's go through them in detail, or at least those I can screencap:

Here is the Drupal 'block' on the front page indicating the most recently reviewed schools of the 'School Reviews' feature:

And when you click more you see this page, and it has an RSS feed as well, here (I've used Feedburner to organize all my feeds).

Here are the latest blog comments:

leading to a page here, which has its own rss feed here.

After which is the Events 'block':

Which leads to a page here, with rss feed here. This was the most complicated of all 'content types' to create, necessitating the need to use Dates, which has a lot of options with Drupal, including the ability to showcase them using a very impressive Calendar view. I've opted not to go that option because while Calendar view is really impressive, a list of chronologically ordered events seemed more useful. Nevertheless, I followed this excellent excellent video tutorial to find out how to do it and it works great.

But the most awesomest feature I had been itching to finally get going was RSS for all the 'content types'. Content types is Drupal terminology which can mean anything from a single page to blogs to picture or video galleries and is absolutely and fully user configurable, even to the RSS. I took a crack at it, and voila, I can now access it on my phone:

Above is the 'ticker' feature for SE phones, below is the 'portrait' way of looking at things:

and here's the landscape:

I've listed all the MomEx feeds here.

At this point I'm in Drupal nirvana with Mom Exchange. I've still 2 more things on my todo list with that site, but for the most part I think I've done most of the things I wanna do with it and now I'll sit back and watch it grow - which is basically SOP, imo, re growing websites 101. You put it in the features you want, work till you get everything the way you want done right, then you leave it alone for, oh, 6 months or so to wait for it's community to grow.

Programming websites is not a constant day to day thing. Day to day is the job for the editorial / content creation team. Programming is something you do till you reach a certain point, then leave it once you get there. You only come back if something really needs fixing (which shouldn't happen very often if you've done a good job in the 1st place). Otherwise you'll never end working on it and it becomes tiresome, courting failure. After around 6 months when I want something new done to it, I can approach it with a fresh perspective. Otherwise if I were hammering at it daily I'd go weary of working on it for too long.

Now I am ready to take on the big cheese of all my websites, KE. Drupaling that site is a from - the - ground - up sort of thing, and will take me, say, 3 or so months. But with what I've learned from MomEx I'm far more prepared than ever.

And now a word about the old Drupal vs. Wordpress Issue

At this point it's just Drupal hands down. Granted, there are two things one needs to know before understanding what I mean. First, is that you have to adopt the 'the right tool for the job' attitude when choosing CMSes, rather than a 'what's more popular' or, heaven forbid 'which is cooler' attitude. Wordpress is an absolutely perfect bells and whistles Blogging Platform that's ready to go, and if blogging is your thing, then WP can do it all for you.

But if you're venturing into other types of content such as videos, forms that will require user input and all sorts of fancy stuff, then Drupal will be your solution. Wordpress can probably be made to do it, but its usually hacky or is otherwise dependent on a plugin developer. With Drupal you can create truly fully modified by yourself content solutions you can tweak to your heart's delight.

And finally, 2nd: Drupal's learning curve is a killer. Let me tell you outright that there were many hair - pulling moments I had to endure before learning what I know. Having said that it's best therefore not to go about Drupal with a deadline on your head, because you would have made life harder for you twice over. I have benefited many times by merely practicing the ritual of 'letting go', by taking a break, watching a little TV or making some coffee, in the middle of a programming problem, before carrying on and tackling it with a clearer mind.

Drupal is HARD SHIT, I'm telling you right now, but as they say, 'What cannot be removed, becomes lighter through patience' (I read that somewhere). In due time you will learn to wield the Force, and a happier more fulfilled web developer you will be (and I'm not even half as capable as the guys in Drupal's chatrooms are, imho).