Overall, I felt this was a great event. The speakers were primarily from the ‘techie’ side of the Drupal spectrum so it was a bit difficult to follow theming/design advice being more of a web marketing and design type and not presently having a solid understanding of Drupal’s terminology, but they provided an excellent overview/foundation for me and others like myself to grow upon.

I learned designing for Drupal can become easier by utilizing grid design tools and other utilities such as Blueprint CSS, NineSixty, Skinr, Studio, Yahoo CSS etc. Using a grid system/CSS framework can significantly reduce development time, address browser compatibility issues via built-in functions/code and allow you to be on the ‘same page’ as other developers in creating web sites and thus set yourself up to get more support by utilizing well-known development tools.

At the end of the second day I sat in on Maureen Lyons’ presentation entitled “Theming from a CSS Framework” which was very valuable as it was presented using a ‘from a designer to a designer’ approach. One can generate Blueprint CSS code via an online generator to help simplify the designing by grid process.

Drupal is an excellent CMS and development framework that offers excellent scalability if a site you build should ever require more features in the future. You may want a brochure web site initially but may want additional elements such as blogs, photo albums, e-commerce functionality, etc. and Drupal has a module (or core functionality already built-in) for virtually anything you can think of. However, with that said, if your project requires a simple solution, you may want to reconsider utilizing Drupal as you may not need such a robust solution and you may very well find Drupal difficult to theme if you are a ‘noob’. Various other open source programs exist for specialized functionality such as Elgg for social networking web sites, WordPress for blogs, Gallery for photo galleries, etc.

More information on the event is available here:

• “Design 4 Drupal: a movement takes off” (via Drupal.org)
• “Drupal Design Camp Boston on June 13-14, 2009″ (via Drupal.org)
• Design 4 Drupal Boston (event web site)

You should ask yourself whether or not you require a site-wide CMS. Publishers for instance may only need a news/article publishing system vs. having the ability to maintain their entire web content collection via the web. Such systems mimic the capability of popular blog systems such as WordPress (www.wordpress.org) and Movable Type (www.movabletype.org) — both very powerful programs.

A big negative of CMS’s is the fact that (out of the box) they tend not to rank well within search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. However, there are ways around this using mod_rewrite on UNIX/Linux systems and if you research the web enough, you may find your CMS offers add-ons/enhancements known as modules or plug-ins which can utilize mod_rewrite’s ability to automatically parse your web site and create ‘search engine friendly’ links. This may require a significant amount of time, but depending on your situation practicality of a CMS to you/your organization it may be worth the research.

All of this aside, popular open source CMS systems on the UNIX/Linux end are Drupal (www.drupal.org), Joomla (www.joomla.org) and Mambo (www.mamboserver.com). Drupal is a very advanced system used by Linux Journal, MTV (I believe in England) and many others… the downside of this system is it has a fairly high learning curve. My understanding with Joomla is many of the original core developers from Mambo’s team moved on to create Joomla so it mimics many of the basic capabilities of Mambo and is now slightly more advanced. Mambo is not a bad CMS however, was developed before Joomla and has a large community base you can use for support and is still being improved upon to date by qualified software engineers.

On the Windows end, you may want to consider looking at either DotNetNuke (www.dotnetnuke.com) or one of Ektron’s CMS’s (www.ektron.com). DotNetNuke is open source software and has a very large support base although support is limited to a forum where inquiries and responses must first be approved by a moderator which can delay response time. Ektron offers their CMS’s at-cost but they offer solid CMS products used by companies such as Yahoo, BAE Systems, etc. and you can talk to a real person when you need to by picking up the phone. Ektron offers CMS400.Net (based on ASP.Net) and CMS300 (having slightly less features and based on classic ASP)… you can review the various features via http://www.ektron.com/cms400-web-cms.aspx?id=1757.

Taking into consideration everyone’s content management needs differ, you may want to take a look at even more options available for review at www.opensourcecms.com that may more specifically match the solution you are looking for. This site lists all the major CMS’s and allows you to test-drive the front-end and administrative back-end on-demand (through their web site) vs. needing to first install on your web server and then evaluate. Google, as you may know is a great search engine for finding even more CMS options if you want to consider a commercial product instead.

And if you decide a CMS is not right for you, search engine results suggest a static/semi-static web site ranks higher than CMS-driven web sites so you have a positive here. Your organization can also manage your web site using a product called Adobe Contribute CS3 (formerly Macromedia Contribute) which allows you to assign users a key allowing them to manage certain areas of your web site while limiting their administrative permissions in the process (i.e. whether or not they can delete files, etc.)