One of my recent side projects was to build a new website for Auckland Game Works. It is still a work in progress but the latest version can be seen here. The idea that I pitched to the group was to try and consolidate all of AGW's web resources - Forums, Wikis, File Storage, Meeting management etc - into a single website, but I didn't have a clear idea of what CMS would be best for the job. I investigated linking different PHP apps together, like Wordpress and phpBB. Unfortunately there are significant difficulties with this approach (Not only linking users together, but also managing Style Sheets) so I started looking around for other solutions.

Drupal seemed to be a pretty good solution (The CMS of Greenpeace, BBC, Nasa, MTV among others) so I uploaded it to a temporary website and had a play with it. Install was straight forward, but it has a really high learning curve. It certainly took awhile to get my head around the hundreds of options, the different types of content that can be posted, and the idiocyncracies of the administration interface (It doesn't have a seperate administration panel!).

However, it is worth the extra effort because it is incredibly powerful - the default installation has built in support for blogs, individual user profiles, forums, comments, contact pages, wikis, search, tags and a lot more. There are also hundreds of extensions available on Drupal.org which can be used to make any kind of website you wish; the content creation kit in particular can be used to make custom forms for posting just about anything.

I am going to migrate to Drupal soon. Wordpress has been good to me but I want to expand the website and do cool new things with it, which WP wouldn't be able to support. Stay tuned.