Drupal 5 - More Reasons to Choose Drupal

Drupal 5.0 was released last January and we immediately tried it in our office. The improvements are noticeable. It's easier to install, has a nicer default theme (Garland and Minelli) and the once-cluttered admin interface has been rearranged under subheadings to make things easier to find.

To give you an idea of how easy it is to set up a Drupal site, we needed to create a live demo for the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Conference we recently attended. We were able to create a demo website/intranet for a fictional municipality. We populated it with a Lessons Learned/Best Practice database, External Network Contacts, and fake Project Profiles. The basic install and configuration/customization took less than 3 hours, thanks to cck (content creation kit) and the Views module. We then asked our staff to pitch in and paste fake (but believable) entries into the databases. In less than a working day, we were able to complete the live demo.

I particularly liked the new default themes because they make it easier to tweak the color scheme using no less than a graphical color wheel! Great work to the guys and chx who did this!

I also appreciated the reorganization of the admin interface. Drupal started with a handful of admin tasks. But as its power grew, so did the clutter of the admin interface. The kickass Drupal developers responded by first conducting user interface studies and using these to reclassify the many admin tasks into a few main subheadings. Drupal administrators will be pleased with this improvement. I am!

Dries Buytaert's blog continues to publish news about Drupal's rising fame and also notable converts to Drupal (Dries is Drupal's creator). Here are some highlights:

• A top linux magazine gives Drupal high marks
• Hillary Clinton's Campaign Site (done by her volunteers)
• Ubuntu famously switched to Drupal