Coping with Drupal

Having only been at this whole blogger/webmster thing for a few weeks, I’m starting to realize that what I want to do is not really within reach unless I have the cash to pay for a web designer or else figure it all out for myself.

WordPress is great for blogging, I love it. But, as far as my percussion site UpbeatRhythms.com is concerned, I want to max it out a lot more and include some cool graphics and maybe some flash and make it all cool and user friendly-like. The blog part is fine, I’ll probably keep it as is even if I change the rest of the site around. But for the main page and for the video content portions, I really want to do something more.

Unfortunately, I’m realizing the limitations of WordPress when it comes to that sort of stuff, so I’ve turned to Drupal for some ideas. Indeed it is a powerful platform, seems like you can do pretty much anything with it. However, right off the bat I’ve started getting error messages and grumpy responses from the bowels of the software whenever I try to do something as simple as set up a menu! And unlike the user friendly widgets and plugins you can find in droves for WordPress, the whole Drupal scene seems much more geared towards programmers and other people who generally speaking have more of a clue. So stupid questions are none too appreciated, and you get a lot of “read the manuel” replies when you try to ask around.

Er..I think I've got some errors to deal with here!

Heading over to the Drupal community forums, I figured maybe I could find some “for dummies” info or something. No such luck. No dummies there, quite the opposite. I have no idea if they’re nice people or whatever, I’m sure they are, but I was too intimidated to even attempt a feeble “hello” in that online mecca. Just the topic titles alone were enough to make my head spin, they might has well have been typing in Greek for all I knew. I found “Theme Development”, and figured that might work. I didn’t even end up clicking on a topic though, being far too intimidated by headings such as “in using the drupal view with attachments, how do I defer the initialization..”, and “I created a view with many fields of one node type,”. Gack!

I can appreciate why programmers make so much scratch, they deserve it!

Still, I really feel as though I want to figure it out and get to work on a more maxed out site (though with my limited skills I’m probably better off figuring out how to max out WordPress as much as I can, or else save up my pennies to shell out to a true computer guru and tell him or her what I’m looking for). If I can figure some things out, I might even consider incorporating them into the Mindbla site as well, although for a simple blog I suppose all the bells and whistles could end up detracting as easily as enhancing. I need to come up with a load of great content first, and worry about that stuff later.

Anyone who has any thoughts on Drupal or other alternatives is welcomed and encouraged to chime in, I can use all the help I can get! Or, for that matter, any advice on maxing out WordPress would be appreciated as well. That’s definitely the alternative avenue I’m seriously considering at this point, assuming I don’t suddenly figure out Drupal by osmosis or something lol.