Some side projects of mine have led me down the path of getting more familiar with Drupal (http://drupal.org) and I have to say that it’s a wonderful and powerful CMS. It definitely has a lot of features that provide the convention or configuration mantra that I’m growing to love the more I use Ruby on Rails.
Theme creation from scratch was a bit of a hurdle, but I think I’m over the hardest learning curves, and it only took a few hours to pick up and run with. I was creating a menu using Drupal’s menu system, and was thinking to myself, “Ok, I’m going to have to figure out how to dig into the backend of Drupal and set some ‘active’ flags when this menu item is clicked, so I can add a nice background to visually show the user where they are in the menu.” But, to my surprise, and delight, Drupal had me covered. If the menu item points to content on the site you’re building, it automagically looks at the current URL, and matches it with the menu item, and adds an “active-trail” class to the menu item’s LI.
Anyway, I just wanted to say a few words, sharing my excitement for Drupal. I may post more on it as time goes on, but if you’re looking for a free CMS to try out, with an expansive community of supporters and module writers, you should really check out Drupal.
