Digging into Drupal

As of late, I've shifted quite dramatically my sysadmining/development activities. On the development front, although Perl is still my mother tongue and I maintain many systems I wrote with it (and my main involvement in Debian is through the <a href=""http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-perl/>pkg-perl group</a>, of course), I've been largely switching over to Ruby - both under the Rails framework and doing standalone stuff.

But somehthing that's new to me (well, relatively - it has been observed I have been playing with the idea in and out for some more time) is entering this maze of twisty little passages, all alike called Drupal. What can I say? I'm quite surprised by it. It is such a reach CMS, and so twistable for almost-anything, that it still defeats me.

I've been asked (ordered? pushed?) to propose a complete plan to replace my Institute's current static-and-butt-ugly-HTML site with something dynamic and manageable, so, of course, this last week has been an intensive Drupal crash-course for me.

Drupal itself is quite complex, yes, and I thought I had it mostly mastered for the trivial tasks. But then, I started looking for some I-thought-quite-simple extra thingies - And I started discovering its user-contributed modules. I've been having quite a bit of fun with them, and as I hate messing up my clean and nice installation, I've even set up a Drupal5 modules APT repository for Etch, where I'm putting the modules as I process them.

As I'm really not into PHP, and I still lack enough of the Drupal framework understanding to really step forward and become responsable for them, I'm not yet even suggesting packaging them for Debian - but a time might come where I upload them as well ;-)

BTW, in case somebody is wandering about this Jaws-to-Drupal scripty I mentioned that other time: It basically works for blog entries (as you can see in my test site - barring some trivial latin1-UTF discrepancies). I have not yet migrated because I'm also trying to migrate my Phoo photo galleries to Acidfree albums... And it's quite a more challenging task than just migrating blog+comments. But soon, I hope - I have a bit more time than in the last weeks to be able to play with it. Anyway, here it is as it is.