America's Fish: Now with more Drupal

Welcome to the new AmericasFish.com, now designed on Drupal.

This is no reflection on my beloved Wordpress, which gets a bad wrap among some developers who see it as nothing more than robust blog software. It's not. It's so much more, especially so with its most recent upgrades and now moving into version 3.0. It's a full publishing platform and we here at America's Fish have used it launch blogs, personal websites and small business websites.

But I also needed to expand my horizons a bit. This conversion began as a training exercise about a month ago when I decided I needed to learn Drupal. About a week in, I realized just how infinite the potential scope of Drupal really is and I wanted an ongoing labratory for Drupal just as the original iteration of AmericasFish.com and InsideTheRockies.com — as well as recent client sites like WasteFarmers.com and DomahidyWeber.com — have been for me learning the possibilites and, yes, limits of Wordpress.

It's still early, but my experience with Drupal has, if anything, made my love for Wordpress stronger. There's no doubting the power and expandability of Drupal, and I have tried to talk myself into the value of using Drupal for recent client websites. But small things — such as the amount of time and number of modules needed just to make Drupal's content creation interface half as friendly as Wordpress is out of the box — have kept me from doing so. Wordpress is friendly and accessible and an ideal solution for those who need help getting a website going but want to take over management later, whether it's as a blog or a site with mostly static content.

The possibilities with Drupal are infinite and for websites with large, longterm potential expansion, it's a better solution. Like Wordpress, there is a module or a plugin for pretty much any conceivable situation. One advantage of Drupal is that many modules are more powerful than their Wordpress counterpart. The downside: I needed five plugins to make AmericasFish.com work well on Wordpress; I needed about 37 to give Drupal the same functionality in content creation and organization. Of course, I can do a few more things with Drupal because all those extra modules gave me some excellent features that some day might be handy.

So they're different CMSes. Even with their sometimes striking similarities they have very different uses. When I started, I tried to form a comparison in my mind to baseball. (It all comes down to baseball for us here at America's Fish.) Drupal was maybe the Yankees and Wordpress the Red Sox. But I'm even less fond of the Red Sox than I am of the Yankees, so that wasn't going to work, and it didn't seem to fit anyway because in the end, these are both systems that are designed for the people, open-source, the opposite of the big-spending, empirical American League East powerhouses. So I'll try this: Drupal is the Phillies or the Dodgers, maybe the Angels; Wordpress is the Twins. You think you might know which team has the better record and is the better team, but chances are you're wrong.

AmericasFish.com on Drupal is, as it was on Wordpress, a work in progress. So, beware changes both major and minor as time goes on.