I'm not buying yet.

I, personally, have struggled with Drupal.

I threw out the notion of easy to implement/administer content management systems years ago when JIST struggled with PostNuke.

With the years that passed since my JISTNuke experience, all the leaps and bounds in web development technology, and hearing all the hype that surrounds Drupal, I thought that my experience with Drupal would be a lot easier than my experience with Nuke was.

Nope.

Each module is totally different from all the others. Each have their own method of config. It's still trial-and-error finding the right combination of check-box enables in a sea of admin menus to get a module to function, let alone behave like I would expect. And I still find that I have to live with some things just not working right, unless I want to spend the hours to dig through some other clown's code and hack away.

I'm sure you can get Drupal to work a lot better than I. I'm still not buying it though.

well, that all agreed i love it, colin.

it's the best implementation for ANSWER EVER!

the kids obviously love it, too.

nice work - altho i would suggest a section of recordings of the campers singing their traditional songs and perhaps some video of elders' tales.

speaking of which, the quicktime and .avi slideshows are cool i'm sure if i could only get them downloaded in less than 10 minutes. how about dumping some of that stuff to flash for quicker distro? get yoself a copy of sorenson squeeze with the On2 VP6 codec plugin and off you go...my only suggestion.

otherwise, a night's work well done!

give my regards to the staff - i am standing in the middle of campus right now, smoking, drinking coffee and, of course, rocking back and forth looking out over the harbor...best idea-making moments of those summers.

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I'm convinced that yes there is a large learning curve when it comes to picking up Drupal. But the Eureka Moment is much stronger with Drupal than with any other CMS that I've played around with to date. At least for me. Sandbagging as usual, I will say that YMMV for sure. What I like about it so far:

- Large community. Sure some are putting together not so great modules, but overall there's some good work going on there and some decent community support
- Extensive modularity of the code allows you to pretty much modify anything you want once you learn the API (which I have yet to really do, just poking around so far)
- The Views and content type creation are pretty neat, and allows you to create dynamic sets of stuff on your web based on how people post, without too much thinking on their part.
- The multisite capability is pretty good, although it can be a little bit of a PITA on occasion.

And Chad - I'll let the staff know. I'll take your suggestions to heart, but some things I'm very short on: and that is true multimedia. Flashifying things, squeezing, etc, just haven't taken the time to get it done. Hell I just put together a picture tool-chain workflow out of perl / imagemagick / and bash scripts for picture posting!

C

yahso...understood.

i didn't mean to sound harsh or anything - justa suggestion.

i understand very well the overhead of these things while on site. it all sounds like a great idea but there is only so much time [and $$$], and even once you get back to JNU it's on with biz as usual and ANSWER stuff has to wait another year.

which is why i must reiterate: WELL DONE!

the site looks and navigates better than it ever has.

evolution takes time and, in the short period you've been at it, you're keeping one hell of a pace.

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Bret, which modules were you trying?

which modules were you trying?