Posts Tagged: Drupal

From Drupal to Jekyll

My biggest goal was to get back to writing instead of applying updates (and thinking of more efficient ways to apply updates).

Long-time Drupal developer @wakah writes about moving his personal blog from Drupal to Jekyll.

This isn’t just about choosing the right tool for the job, its fundamentally about choosing (or not choosing) Drupal. The part about spending your time trying to think of more efficient ways to update Drupal resonated so loudly with me. The hours I spent in the Terminal making database backups and backups of backups, and saving the sites directory to somewhere else, and zipping it all up and downloading it and organizing it on my local machine, etc, are hours I’ll never get back.

I don’t know if anyone else is thinking this way, but I believe Drupal is at a crossroads. Its too complicated and ornery to be used to power simple blogs or small websites, and it has not been pitched to developers who are looking for a CMS/framework hybrid. If anything, Drupal has carefully chosen not to market it that way.

Just because @wakah chose to simplify his workflow and try a new hot tool like Jekyll doesn’t mean he’s abandoning or turned against Drupal, but it unavoidably says a lot about how he feels about it.

Why I switched to WordPress

One of the 500 reasons why I switched to WordPress from Drupal lies below. If you’re reading this as a non-coder, please simply understand that this markup is absolutely heinous, overcomplicated and completely unnecessary.

<!-- main row: width = grid_width -->
<div id="main-wrapper" class="main-wrapper full-width">
<div id="main" class="main row grid16-16">
 <div id="main-inner" class="main-inner inner clearfix">

 <!-- main group: width = grid_width - sidebar_first_width -->
 <div id="main-group" class="main-group row nested grid16-16">
 <div id="main-group-inner" class="main-group-inner inner">

   <div id="main-content" class="main-content row nested">
   <div id="main-content-inner" class="main-content-inner inner">
   <!-- content group: width = grid_width - (sidebar_first_width + sidebar_last_width) -->
   <div id="content-group" class="content-group row nested grid16-11">
   <div id="content-group-inner" class="content-group-inner inner">

     <div id="content-region" class="content-region row nested">
     <div id="content-region-inner" class="content-region-inner inner">
     <a name="main-content-area" id="main-content-area"></a>
     <div id="content-inner" class="content-inner block">
       <div id="content-inner-inner" class="content-inner-inner inner">

       <h1 class="title">Front Page</h1>

       <div id="content-content" class="content-content">

For the sake of context, and humour, the same markup in WordPress could easily look like this:

	<div id="main">
	 <div id="content"> 

       <h1 class="title">Front Page</h1>

ht to @ncbeets for reminding me of exactly how happy I am with WordPress.

Face tomorrow together

When Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillin in 1928, many declared the war against infections and harmful microorganisms to be over. No longer, they thought, would people needlessly die from curable infections now that they had a secret weapon at their sides. But of course it was not to be so. Researchers discovered the first penicillin resistant organisms just a little more than a decade later, and within two decades, resistance to penicillin was widespread. In the five or more decades leading up to today, every single antibiotic that has been produced and consumed by humans has had described cases of resistance. Even the brand new ones; even the really ‘strong’ ones.

Over at infectionNet we wanted to help do something about this, so we’ve been working hard on a contribution of our own. Yesterday we launched a global inventory of projects that promote proper use of antimicrobials. Our goal over the next few months is to highlight the work of people around the world, give them a voice for their ideas, and applaud them for their efforts in combating a global problem.

Sure, the web is a huge place, and this is just one small corner of it. But that’s where you need to start: small. All of the world’s big ideas started the exact same way.