TWIFcomp

OK, more stuff is working now.  Not that it matters to anyone on the reading end of the blog, but there's now a rich-text formatting package installed that lets me type in new stuff in technocolor, with lots of formatting features more or less along the lines of MS-Word.  The editor was unfortunately named FCKedit thanks to the initials of its creator. I see on its website that the project is now being renamed CKedit -- no surprise there.  

So far, I've played around with a number of content management systems. I started off with PHPnuke when I was learning PHP, but wanted something more flexible.  While we lived in Bangladesh, I built a personal site on Typo3 which was like plunging hot pokers into my eyes. When I needed to quickly get a site up for work, I went to Mambo (later Joomla).  That project site is still up at www.connect-bangladesh.org.

When I got back to the US, I spent a while reviewing other CMSs and eventually settled on Drupal, not only because of its open source nature and philosophy of extensibility, but because it was so popular in the Washington, DC area and had a large following among both political and non-profit organizations.  Eventually, I made a site based on the CivicSpace distribution of Drupal for Relief International, my employer at the time. The selling point there was the CivicCRM module which allowed us to crank out a customized contact manager very quickly. With offices around the world and all kinds of connections to funding organizations, governments, individual donors, etc., it made sense to have a very distributed contact manager that we could access centrally from all offices.

During the same summer, I set up the RileyCon website. I started roughing it out under Drupal 4.6 and completed it under some early version of 4.7.  I get the sense that this is when Drupal itself turned some sort of corner gaining enough followers for critical mass and becoming well enough documented for the average bear.  The critical extensions of Drupal were just making their appearance: the views and CCK modules. At the time, I had to patch about half the modules I used because of specific quirks related to my installation, and even then some modules had funky behavior.  

I knew that Drupal was evolving quickly and that the site would quickly obsolete.  The drupal world is now headed towards version 7 which seems as similar to version 4.7 as English to Dutch.  Before I go back and update the RileyCon site, my goal is to get this site reasonably settled and to explore the version 6 platform.