Senior Project; Drupal

Moving right along, this week's alternative is Drupal.
It is far more complicated, and I won't lie, 1 week wasn't enough to learn all of the ins and outs. This is a far more comprehensive system, and also much more complex.

I spent nearly the entirety of Monday/Tuesday setting up Drupal and messing with themes. It was significantly harder to install then Wordpress, but that could be chalked up to not having any outside help. The time spent on the theme ended up being wasted, as I found a theme that worked right off the bat.

Not sure what's up with the missing pictures, but otherwise this layout is nicer in my opinion to the default.

The ease of customizability is fairly nice; I like that there are several default color sets, and on top of that it's easy to take a preset scheme and modify whatever you want, both with #FFF codes and a color wheel. 

The default format seems very geared towards bloggers, since all articles are by default posted in order from least recent to most recent. Pages, the other type of default content, aren't visible at all unless you either set them as "sticky" or promote them to the front page. I could not figure out how to place them elsewhere, but it would surprise me if that were not possible.

One of the things I appreciate with the articles is that they require alternate text. Normally something optional, it's a placeholder for slow connections or users with photos disabled. It was sort of a surprise. I also appreciate that it explains what exactly that is, because not all web developers may know that it's a thing.

Easily the biggest & best surprise was the security features of Drupal. On the Configuration page, I noticed the spooky red box above.

Surprise! I have security issues! This was sort of astonishing, as Wordpress had nothing of the sort that I could see. Not only does Drupal show you what you have wrong, it provides links to address the issues. Life would be so much easier if everything did this...

Back to the topic of configuration, I was overwhelmed b the number of different extentions that are installed by default, let alone the number on their website. This is really where only having 1 week shows itself, as I really can't tell you what most of these do.

Some of these, luckily, are fairly self-explanatory; things like "Toolbar", "Statistics", "Search", and "Responsive Image" are all helpful and easy to glance and enable.

The behind the scenes appearence was appealing and simplistic enough, but something else that surprised me was the fact that there were themes just for the behind the scenes stuff. It certainly helps lend all sorts of tools to gear it in different ways then the default blog sort-of style, and helps Drupal seem infinitely more appealing in my eyes.

The help page was surprising, not for the fact that it was present, but for the fact that it was far more streamlined then I had anticipated.

I think that pretty much cover's my thoughts and takeaways from Drupal. I can easily see this sort of engine being much more broadly useful and dynamic then Wordpress, although it's very hard to get into cold turkey. This is something that requires in depth reading, background knowledge, or even classes to get a handle on.
Now, time to explore something new and crazy.