Drupal Progress Report

There's nothing to get wildly excited about yet, but I must say there is a deep-down growing attachment forming between Drupal and moi. If ever there was an application that needed a serious makeover in the usability and documentation departments, this is certainly one for that list.

Come to think of it, usability and documentation are quite related. However, to be clear, improvements in the administrative workings, layout, manipulation of the many available components and their interactivity is what's urgently needed.

A lot of thought and work has clearly been put into this but, frankly, it smacks of do hickory, and is quite unprofessional. Of course, it is unprofessional; the work of a distributed, volunteer community. So my comments should be taken as a critique that sets benchmarks and goals, rather than a criticism of the people concerned.

And speaking of those people, apart from a somewhat grumpy, defensive and arrogant attitude in the forums, they have achieved quite a feat. Drupal is actually quite powerful and seems thus far to be exceptionally stable. So don't let my "warts and all" evaluative comments detract from recognizing the exceptional product that is Drupal.

Actually, calling Drupal a product doesn't feel quite right. It feels more organic than that. Perhaps there is something of each of it's developers and contributers in it. A community development project can certainly take on a life of its own. I suspect Drupal has done that.

So what have I actually achieved? Yes, I did title this a progress report so that's a fair question.

Well, I now have mastered (hmmm, maybe mastered is a bit strong... perhaps tamed) the menu and navigation system and have posted several pages and made several blog posts. These have been appropriately turned into RSS feeds and I have managed to use CaRP on both Healthy Vitamin Choice and Herb Health Guide to pull those feeds into suitable HTML pages.

You can see the places I've placed various feeds here:

• Full feed in home page margin at Healthy Vitamin Choice
  
• Vitamin feed in the blog page at Healthy Vitamin Choice
• Herbs feed at bottom of home page at Herb Health Guide
  
• Full feed in the about the Health Gazette page at Herb Health Guide
  
• Bottom of the site map page at Herb Health Guide (for good measure!)
  

Much of the progress has been on the non-Drupal sites, but was totally contingent on getting The Health Gazette (on Drupal) up an running correctly.

Well that's it for now. I have an ezine to publish...