On to Drupal Part 2 – the Exploration

As it turned out, a new release of Drupal had just been released when I took a second look. This came as a stroke of good luck for me as I would not have liked to go through the hassle of upgrading from 4.5.x to the current 4.6 etc after building a siyr.

As I browsed the features page, some tings screamed “Hey, I could use that!” to me :

• Collaborative Book – this ought to make indexing of content much easier
• Friendly URLs – this goes one step further than Mambo‘s own Search Engine Friendly URLs by enabling easy-to-remember URLs
• Role based permission system – still rather primitive in the current version of Mambo, but very flexible here
• Version control – allows for easy roll-back of articles etc

And of course, there’re the integrated comments system, forums, news aggregators etc which should come in really handy if I needed them.

The above features fit perfectly with my vision of a webportal where students can contribute articles, reviews, stories and post comments on them, with different groups of students being able to edit, approve or moderate different types of content submissions.

Added to that was this blog post showing Drupal to compare most favourably against PostNuke and Mambo.

It was settled then..I pointed my browser at the Downloads section and started the install.