Misc…

There have been quite a few things going on around here. First, and easiest to deal with, was the upgrade to WP 2.1 (Ella). It was a seamless upgrade as far as I can tell and I’ve experienced exactly no problems. 🙂
The next order of business is the fact that I’m on my third day without a cigarette. I started Sunday evening, so this evening will be 72 hours. I haven’t killed anyone yet, not even a good maiming. If this keeps up, perhaps I’ll stop using a patch rather sooner than later.
Finally, instead of working on WordPress for the last day or two, I’ve been installing a private Drupal installation for a committee to which I belong. Given that my first site building experience (ignoring the hand coded HTML of years ago) has been in WP, my initial reaction to Drupal was “WordPress on Steroids.” In fact, however, they are two very different beasts.
For this committee I needed to expand a bit on what I can do (not necessarily what can be done). For this work we’ll need regular blog-like features, forums, file upload and dowload, calendars, and stuff I’ve probably not thought of yet.
Drupal was no harder than WordPress to set up (the installation was through fantastico as was WP). It was longer because there is just that much more stuff to do, but it’s very simple. I admit, however, to buying a book on the topic. For WP, I just went at it.
The book was Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress. I found it to be very easy to use but have never felt talked down to by the authors. On the whole, if you are a real amateur as I am, it’s a decent book. I’d have preferred something a bit more recent, but have not experienced any problems at all in using the instructions.
I’d love to show the site off, but as I said, it’s a private site and not everyone would be comfortable with visitors, at least at this point.
As for Drupal itself, I highly recommend it if you need something more than a blog!
Aloha!