Leaving the cave

Open source playtime

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Having been ill this week, I had some time to fiddle around with a few open source CMSs.

I first tried out Joomla, because I read on twitter that a collegue of mine had used it before.
Installation was smooth and easy. Once installed, I was totally lost.
A huge learning curve doomed before my eyes. Hmmm not something I wanted.

Since I use different authoring tools and LMSs daily, I would expected things to be more intuitive.
But then, Moodle had given me  about the same overwhelming feeling (but then I was forced to learn it).

Again, on twitter, someone was having issues with his Drupal install. Furthermore, I knew another collegue of mine used that CMS, and that even Obama’s site war driven by Drupal.
So I decided to give it a try.

The Drupal install was quite something different: a lot more techical, but luckily well-documented.
After the installation, I was having issues with the theme, that is, it was not visible, not even the default ones…
But after a few installs and much research online, I found out I was doing nothing wrong. There were some issues with my hosting provider and I needed to change some File Permissions (Excuse me?).
The concept and functions of ‘File Permissions’ was the most important learning event for me during (and after) this install. The most interesting source was this: UNIX access permissions.

Why sticking with Drupal?
After installation, it doesn’t look that overwhelming at all. Do I understand it? No, not without the explanation of a few concepts. But I believe I can take it from there.

So, one more thing to organise…

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