For upgrading from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7, you probably will need to redo some things, but if your content is all created with well-maintained modules (CCK etc.), there should be a smooth upgrade path provided by the module coders. To be honest, I’ve never actually done a version to version upgrade, but in general Drupal tries to be backward compatibility as much as possible.

In my experience, I too have had a hard time working within a site designed by someone else, and I think that a key to learning it is starting from scratch and building your own thing. I mean, the more I work with it, the more Drupal seems like a platform instead of software. That is, you have to build it into what you want it to do. To continue this analogy, unlike software which can be made more transparent through logical design and clear comments, there’s little such top-down view for a Drupal install. That can make it hard to learn from the outside-in.

As far as updating security patches, I don’t know of anything that will do it automatically, but I’ve been meaning to take a look at Drush. As I understand it, it’s a command-line utility that works for Drupal modules much like apt-get works for linux packages. So downloading, installing and (I should think) upgrading should be streamlined.

Maybe this weekend we could talk through the process of building a Drupal site to do specific things?

@Boone

I like that semi metaphor. To extend it further, Drupal, like a big rig, requires you to work through 18 gears before you’re up to highway speed, whereas as WordPress gets you 0 – 60 in five minutes.

I like your point about maximal modularity helping you get a tool that’s the best at what it does. I think Drupal *can* be good at a lot of the things that MediaWiki (e.g.) does, but its advantage is that when you (finally) get a wiki + blog + social networking layer + LMS layer + whatever working under Drupal, you’ve already got the single sign-on working within a (hopefully) cohesive interface. That’s not without effort, of course, and I find I still have to remind my students how to create different kinds of content (as well as that different types of content are actually different).

The academic project that I’m bringing to THATCamp is the CUNY Academic Commons (see my post), which is built with WordPress MU, Buddypress, bbPress, and Mediawiki – the small pieces, loosely joined approach. I guess the idea is supposed to be that by thinking of the project in a maximally modular way, you guarantee that each tool will be the absolute best at what it’s intended to do. But embracing specialized pieces of software means abandoning a totally cohesive interface for users – no matter how much skinning I do, the basic metaphors and UI elements of each component are fundamentally different.

So I would definitely be interested in taking part in this kind of conversation.

I have to admit that some of the problems I’ve experienced have come from having to basically run a Drupal site that someone else designed (selected the modules, set up views, etc). If I had put it together myself, maybe I’d have a better understanding of where to fix problems or the rationale for using modules that appear to have no documentation and are no longer being developed.

So my experience of Drupal is at odds with what I can see that it can do — I just don’t have the expertise to do those things (and when I’m working with Drupal, I wish that I had the programming skills to make changes so that doing what *I* want to do with the system will be easier and more productive). So I suppose this is all to say that I’m almost more interested in how you learned to learn Drupal use and development than in what you’ve actually built with it (although I’m not un-interested in that aspect).

www.pennguide.org

I chose this platform a) for its gmap plugin and b) because I already had some familiarity with Drupal. I don’t have much experience with coding, so being able to modify a product like this is great.

Speaking of which, your comment reminds me of a short anecdote. I once sat in on the final round of an undergrad software competition where teams had to make sales pitches to a panel of judges. One group had produced a CMS, and they pitched it by proudly repeating “you can do anything you want to with our product.” After their presentation, one judge wisely commented: “When you tell me I can do whatever I want to with your product, you’re really telling me you don’t know what I want to do with it.”

I think Drupal evangelists can fall into this trap as well, and my post above may be an example of this. That’s why I think it’s still important to start with the problem.

In any case, I’d be happy to present what I’ve done with it.

Also, just to add to the list of Drupal resources, Lullabot has some good stuff.

Anyway, when I started reading your comment, I assumed the main target for your drupal-ire would be its user interface (both for administrators and content creators). I mean, just in the contest between WordPress and Drupal, WordPress absolutely wins on ease of use, and Drupal’s comparative barriers to access are a sticking point whenever it comes up in these discussions. To that point, I’ll just say Drupal really isn’t that bad, once you get used to it, and I actually like it’s lack of a native rich-text editor. Also, usability is a big focus for the forthcoming Drupal 7.

I checked around for discussion of commentpress on drupal, and I was surprised to see no one’s really jumping on it yet. I mean, on drupal.org I just find a couple of “sounds interesting” posts. I’m certain that a drupal version of commentpress would be possible, though I imagine most of the code would have to be rewritten from scratch. I’ve already got too many summer projects already or I’d be tempted to try it myself. 🙂