Matt Henderson's Blog

Today we (my buddy Arto and I. Ok, Arto with me looking over his shoulder) made some major under-the-hood changes to this blog, namely, migrating from the Wordpress blogging system, to Drupal. In particular, Drupal version 6.

Why the change?

• Capability. Drupal is an amazingly capable platform. For example, I’d like to have a content type on this blog called “route”. For articles of that type, I want to include some common data elements, such as a GPS track file, that can be displayed on a Google map, and downloaded by others interested in following my route. In Drupal, I can do this by creating a new content type (node type in geek-speak).

  So in this respect, Drupal is quite a future-proof system (relative to the others), in terms of having the infrastructure to do things in the future, that you didn’t foresee today. (Not to mention some cool technologies coming the Drupal way…)

• Eating my own dog food. My company has been working for the past year or so developing (in collaboration with the US government) an advanced communications and collaboration platform, based on the Drupal platform. All of our work on that project gets released back into the Drupal community as open-source, and so I’ll be directly benefiting from our own work.

• Available support. As a consequence of the above, I’m surrounded by people every day that can resolve nearly any weblog issue I might have. :-)

There may be some initial bumps (I think anyone subscribed to my blog will see the first ten posts marked as unread when they refresh the feed), the migration appears to have gone very smoothly.