Joyful Acceptance

For my generation, HTML and similar markup languages are essential to computer use, things that we learned in elementary school. However, few people, since the passing of vanity pages hosted on the likes of Geocities and Angelfire, use static HTML pages for even the smallest websites. Dynamically generated content now dominate, and developments such CSS and content management web content to be kept separate from design.

I always thought a CMS would be good only for blogs. However, after installing Drupal on the site of my robotics team, I have discover that it is quite nice for your entire website to be dynamically generated, if a bit slow on my shared host. CMS objects like Drupal's “nodes” can be subtly reconfigured to serve a variety of different needs. A node can be a blog post with a comment system, a wiki page with a history of changes, a static page, or a forum post with replies.

The best part of all, in my opinion, was that the method of creating content within each one was always the same: go to the node type, and then type the content into a box. It was then stored, and served to users so that it looked the same as the rest of the site. In other words, once it was set up, you have only to worry about your content, and not the appearance or layout of your site. In addition, it was all kept separate, so that you can change one without affecting the other. Finally, nodes all share many elements, like themes, tags, and such, so changes to the common elements are global and do not have to applied to each individual node.

Now, I am at best an electronics hobbyist, focusing primarily on embedded systems and low-power microcontrollers. I can hardly ever be said to be “good at the web stuff.” Yet, I was able to set up a full featured website for my team that can present information to visitors and team members alike, while offering tools like an integrated mailing list system and project planning/division tool. Drupal also powers this, which is at the moment my personal website. However, I plan to expand it to fit its original purpose (of which the name suggests at subtly), and I feel that my choice offers me the flexibility to do so.

So, it is my humble opinion that a CMS such as Drupal is a valuable choice to have for constructing a website (even a small one!), and leaves many options to admins for expansion. Of course, this is what everybody already knows, so this web log post has really been an excercise in rhetoric for me—literally; I was practicing my rather appalling essay-writing skills.