I'd like to introduce the visitors of my blog (mostly CakePHP people being linked from the mailing list these days!) to my new personal blog site, http://jbenner.net.

I felt like having technical blog entries next to personal picture galleries and such a little out of place. That plus the fact that this was the first Drupal site I ever set up... I felt I needed to move to some new digs... with every intention of posting more regularly with technical and non-technical articles alike.

Stay tuned!

This content has been relocated to http://jbenner.net/blog/analysis-of-drupal-as-a-framework

This content has been relocated to http://jbenner.net/blog/write-a-reasonably-complex-application-with-cake....

This content has been relocated to http://jbenner.net/blog/understanding-cakephp-associations.

This content has been relocated to http://jbenner.net/blog/cake-drake-and-drupal-my-search-for-the-ultimate....

Well I've just finished installing the new site. It ended up taking longer than I expected (I should probably be in bed right now), but everything seems to have gone well, and I didn't want to stop while I was on a roll! I've been doing a lot of work recently on Everyday Liturgy, so I felt in the web-site-admin mood, and this is a project I've been considering for a while. That combined with my desire to start publishing some articles on some of the stuff I'm doing in PHP and IT stuff in general to help others who might be trying to accomplish some of the same things.

This web site is going to serve as a center for a number of activities. Part of the goal is to replace and update the old site, while also implementing some new things, not least of which is blogging capability. Soon I'll be moving our gallery over here as well as all the other content pages -- I'll probably stick them in some sort of section about our wedding or engagement or something.

I've worked with a decent number of the various Open Source CMS packages out there: PostNuke and some of its cousins, Mambo family (mostly Joomla), Wordpress, a some dabbling in the others while evaluating them. Of all the systems I've used or played with, Drupal has easily stood out of the crowd. We chose it to power the PBU Intranet a few months ago, and my experience working on that with the other guys in the IT Department has been nothing but positive. Drupal comes with a great set of standard features, and has a module available for just about anything else you'd like to do. Many of the other Open Source CMS solutions were either unnecessarily difficult to configure (*Nuke), came with too few standard features (Mambo/Joomla), or offered only marginal (or MEAN) communities to draw from (remain nameless for their protection!).

For instance, while working on Everyday Liturgy, which is powered by Joomla (my favorite CMS when we started the site), I was reinforced in my love for Joomla's configurability -- but over time, I've learned that this can be a negative as well. Not only is it configurable, but anything you want to do requires customization! At this point I've got Everday Liturgy so customized that upgrading to a more recent version of Joomla (or many of the various extensions) is almost out of the question, due to the number of changes I would have to RE-do. Drupal, however, has allowed me to get everything just how I want it with (nearly) no customizations that exist outside of the settings found in the administration interface.

Now to be fair, Joomla is getting set to release 1.5, which as I see it, stands to be almost more of an application framework/platform than just a CMS. On the other hand, at PBU, we're using Drupal/Drake/CakePHP to develop custom applications very successfully.

Anyway, the site is up, and I'm very happy with it and my hosting company (Bluehost) right now. Everything has been smooth, and I've been able to accomplish everything I wanted (relatively) easily.