Joe Fleming dot net

I know I said before that I would be replacing WordPress with Drupal around here, and I did start working on that. However, the more I read about Drupal, the harder it seems to do custom things. Actually, it’s more a problem of poor documentation than it is a lack of flexibility. Still, if I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s hard to learn anything.

Granted, I could easily replace WordPress for the sake of my blog here (and probably still will at some point), but that’s not why I was planning to learn it. I wanted something that would allow me to crank out new pages quickly without constantly restarting from scratch. I do have a very weak framework I’ve written to try to achieve this, but every time I start a new site, I feel compelled to re-do at least part of it, so in the end I don’t save any time. In fact, I lose time because I have to re-learn the changes I made for each site when I need to maintain them.

In an effort to save time when I put together sites for people, I’ve been working on a universal engine I can use. It is modeled loosely off the MercuryBoard code and, for the most part, has served me pretty well. Recently, I’ve tried to revamp it with more object oriented code, integrating PEAR and a few other niceties. Still, the more and more I use it, the more I realize it saves me very little time. In fact, it actually costs me time when I have to go back and update the sites. It seems, sadly, the idea of a flexible CMS or framework is just too abstract for my skills.

I’ve spent some time reading about Symfony, which looks like an amazing project. I’m positive I can make it do anything I would need, but the learning curve is pretty steep and I’m worried that the time I’d take to learn it wouldn’t really pay off in the end. I like a lot of the concepts, but I’m just not completely sold on it.

So what does that have to do with WordPress? Well, I’ve recently revisited a project that I spent some time with in the past but never really did much with. That project is Drupal.