New Site - Fishers Island Conservancy

We spent most of Good Friday on pro bono work -- producing a simple website for the Fishers Island Conservancy.

I tell paying clients and friends alike that I'm not a web developer (unlike the pros at Design4Results and ImageCog), but more of a "prosumer" who can kick his way through a content management system to get something simple done.

In this case, Drupal. This is yet another open-source PHP-based program, with several things going for it.

• Easy Installation. Download, unzip, untar, upload, change permissions, run installer. Nice. Though, today I tried my had at SSH'ing into the server for part of that job... and hit a wall with file permissions.


• User Management. What attracted me first to Drupal was a "salesforce extranet" project in 2007. The client needed several layers of user permissions, from "go away" to "read content" to "read and comment" to "change anything". Users also had to be able to register themselves, but be allowed in only with an admin's approval. We also needed a forgot-password function. And it had to be dead simple to operate. Drupal had all that.


• Big User Community. Mostly for the sake of troubleshooting. The forums are active and easily searchable.


• Free.


• Fast.


• Good SEO.


• Handles Files Attachments Well. This was important for the extranet project.


• Built-in Keyword Search.


• Loads of Add-ons.The ones I reach for first are Google Analytics, Lightbox2, and DHTML menu.

The only quibble I have is that the themes (i.e. skins, templates) all start to look the same after a while. The one I used was Marinelli, for the record.