Discovering Drupal

last night I started learning Drupal at TopFloorStudio’s new TopFloorUniversity class. so far my impression is that Drupal has a lot in common with Joomla, a CMS I’m more familiar with, but with a few perks off the bat.

1. A Better Blog. in a few moments you can set up a blog and allow/disallow commenting. trying to do this with Joomla is a headache. Joomla has the appearance of a blog without the actual features of one, unless you spend a lot of time customizing and upgrading with extensions, which more often than not cost money.

2. Free Modules. whereas Joomla seems to be increasingly leaning toward the commercial, Drupal supplies many developer-created modules for free.

3. No “back-end” (sort of). Drupal actually appears more like the CMS Adobe Contribute then Joomla, where usually as a developer you would log in to a back-end admin area that looks nothing like your actual site. this makes previewing almost unnecessary, and therefore editing is faster.

those are my first impressions, and I’m excited to continue learning more about Drupal in the coming weeks!