Packing up and moving
By Adam Gaffin, NetworkWorld.com, 05/20/05
It's been a couple years since we last changed blogging platforms, and now that our main site redesign is finished, I need something to occupy my time, so ...
Over the next few weeks, we'll be migrating our Weblogs and forums over to Drupal, an open-source PHP platform. I'll start with Compendium (because why should I subject other folks to the problems that will no doubt crop up?) and Gearblog, because Mark excels at finding problems and then bugging me until I finally fix them.
We currently use Moveable Type for Weblogs and Gossamer Forum for forums. Both are very nice apps and I really love their templating abilities; it's amazing how you can tease stuff out of their databases with relatively simple PHP-like tags.
But they don't talk to each other, which limits what we can do in terms of community. And running Movable Type in static mode on a server farm is painful - somebody leaves a comment on a blog post and it may not show up for everybody else depending on which server they happen to hit, unless we rebuild the blog pages, which is just impractical. Yes, the current version of MT can be run dynamically, but to be honest, I don't have the money in my budget to buy a license big enough for all the blog authors we already have, let alone the ones we want to add.
In a single, dynamic platform, Drupal supports a lot of the things we want to do. Blogs and forums, obviously. Single sign-in for community stuff (so you log in to comment on Gibbs, you can just hop over to the security forum without having to log in again). Adding blogs is easy - we could set it up so every registered user gets one. It has polls, even. It has a very nice taxonomy system, which is good since we're all about categorization these days. The code seems compact and well designed (I'm no PHP coder, but even I've been able to tweak things) - and there are tons of add-in modules to play with (which means there's an active developer community; including folks who've written a script to import Movable Type posts). It has RSS out the wazoo (each blog, each item in the taxonomy has its own feed, and you can combine them to create your own customized feeds). And it's well within my budget (being free and all).
Drawbacks? As mentioned, I love MT's ability to generate tiny bits of content via templates. Drupal uses "themes," which are good for setting the overall look and feel of the site, not so good if you just want to, say, extract the three most recent headlines from Ellen Messmer's Security Notes and embed them via SSI at the top of our Security Research Center. That's where the RSS will come in; we'll need to build a new template in our content-management system (a heavyweight system with its own developer's workbench, which, trust me, you don't want to let me near) to grab the feed and then build them onto the pages.
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