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Choices, choices

• February 16th, 2008

• Filed under Drupal

(Part 1 in a series about setting up a corporate website in Drupal. Part 2 Part 3 Part 4)

I’ve been investigating content management systems for a while now, looking for a modern, php-based alternative to dot net nuke which our company website is currently built on. (DNN drives me absolutely crazy for many reasons which I won’t rant on about here for the good of everyone’s sanity, tempting though it is.)

My criteria were pretty wide-ranging – we’re a small company with me as resident geek so I didn’t want to learn one CMS for all the different websites we’ll have to design and manage in the future. These range from our company site, which must include rich media content, community functions, blogs and news, to simple branding sites where design is paramount and more complicated corporate sites where structured data models are needed to link into existing product databases. And, perhaps crucially, we wanted the CMS to be free!

I considered the blog alternatives (Wordpress, Expression Engine) but they’re limiting for static content. And Joomla! didn’t seem to include the kind of hardcore data structures that are necessary to deal with complicated backends. Eventually I settled on Drupal.

I’m currently in the middle of a site redesign for an industrial company. The site is about as basic as you can get – who are they, what they do, a few pages on their different products. It would be perfectly feasible to do the lot in XHTML and CSS but I wanted to see if Drupal, and particularly the Drupal theming engine, could play nice with this sort of site.

As I haven’t found much information on set-up for this sort of project (there is a thread here but it’s waffly, and some corporate sites linked here), I’m going to record what I’ve done here. It’ll prop up my shaky memory and hopefully help out someone else too! Next: Useful modules

• Tagged as: CMS, Drupal, webdesign

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