CMS Ramblings
WordPress 2.6 was released a few days ago. I’ve upgraded my installations for echodrift and 365 but I have other installations for projects that are rather dormant. It’s made me think: why do I have to upgrade each and every installation? Wouldn’t it be much more efficient for me to be able to manage each of these with a single CMS? To my knowledge that’s not a feature that WordPress has (but it can run multiple installations from one database; that’s not what I’m looking for). And so I began to search for a CMS that would do just that. One installation, multiple sites.
I’ve recently learned about Expression Engine. However, you have to purchase a license to use their multiple site manager. I’m not quite ready to dish out $100 for a non-commercial license, much less $250 if I ever decided I did want to do something commercial. -chop chop- It’s gone from the list.
Several years back I ran a few sites using Movable Type. I decided to look them up and see what’s changed since then. While it does support multiple blogs/sites it’s still Perl based. Since I’d prefer to work with PHP (aka I’m too lazy not motivated to learn Perl right now) -chop chop- It’s also out.
There were others. Many others, actually. I had no idea that there were so many different CMSs out there. Then I found out that Drupal can handle multiple sites with one installation. After looking at more of the features and some of the available modules (akin to plugins for WordPress) I thought hey, this might not be so bad. I found that I could install it from my CPanel so voila. I have it installed. I spent a bit of time yesterday making test posts and attempted to familiarize myself with the system. Then I decided it was time to start reading the docs about creating my own theme. Then I thought… what have I done. It seems to be slightly more complex than theming for WordPress. At least, to me it does. I know that it’s going to take more than a day to learn how to configure everything so we’ll see. I don’t know enough about it yet to make the commitment to change everything over but I’m hopeful. Besides, I’ve been needing a reason to learn something new for a while. It seems that I get bored when I don’t.