First Blog Post - A Drupal Experience

Today I thought was going to be a busy one working on the car we have for 24 Hours of Lemons, but it turned out that Tom, the guy who owns the car, was just painting the rollbar before the rain comes tomorrow.  So instead, I went out for a wonderful brunch with Lu at Pasta Pomodoro (turns out they do brunch and its a simple but delicious menu), and then I set to work actually doing something with the domain I had purchased, carlspanoghe.com.  

I decided to use drupal  as I have been playing around with it and building Lu's new version of her Street Smart Brazil website (as of yet not launched).  I had done a lot of research for that and I found drupal to be by far the most advanced and flexible open-source CMS available.  I know a lot of people like to use wordpress or moveable type to blog, but I figured that drupal will give me the most flexibility to let this site grow.  I also think that drupal is more valuable to know inside and out (sorry Wordpress fans), so what better way to keep up my chops than have my own site?

A couple of modules I found helpful to me so far:

• FCKEditor - Drupal comes with only a plain-text editor, so you have to install a WISYWIG one if you want it (which I do).  FCK was my choice, regardless of the strange name.  Note that if you install this, you'll have to do an extra step of going to FCKEditor's website and downloading another package to put inside the folder where FCKEditor resides.  
• IMCE - this module integrates with FCKEditor and enables the user to upload images.  
• Administration Menu - this doesn't make a difference to the audience, but will put a very handy menu on the top of the screen when you are in administration mode

Due to my current lack of experience in theming Drupal, I found a very attactive theme called addari.  I really like this theme, but I intend to make my own theme at some point--once I have figured it out.  

Putting in the twitter feeds and adsense block was fun.  I used drupal's "block" functions and basically pasted the HTML code provided by the two websites into the blocks.  One thing to remember (found this out after a few minutes of frustration) is to make sure that the input format is unfiltered HTML for anything complex.  For the adsense I actually had to enable a core module called "PHP Filter" and use the "PHP code" content type that is created.  

I'll blog more about my Drupal experience as I continue