I have a small anecdote on my experience with Drupal, Django, and custom development.
I was writing a site that required a number of custom content types, some of them fairly complex, and a Solr back-end for full-text and faceted search. I had developed a number of Drupal sites up to that point, but this was probably the most complex one. I tore my hair out for a month or two, trying to get all of the different Drupal modules to talk to each other, and writing lots of glue code to go between the custom modules using the (sometimes undocumented) hooks for each module. One day I became so frustrated that I decided that I would give myself 24 hours to re-do the site in Django. If I could get the Django site up to par with the Drupal site in that amount of time, I would move forward with Django. Otherwise, I would keep going with Drupal. Up to that point, I had done the Django tutorial a couple times, and implemented a few test sites, but not much else. Within 24 hours I had re-implemented the content type models, hooked up the Solr search, worked out a few of the templates, and was well on my way to actually making progress with the site. More than that, I was enjoying the coding rather than staring in frustration at hooks and wondering why something wasn’t getting called when it should be. Since then I haven’t touched Drupal. Cheers, -Andrew On Feb 13, 2014, at 9:59 PM, Riley Childs <rchi...@cucawarriors.com> wrote: > WordPress is easy for content creators, but don't let the blog part fool you, > it is a fully developed framework that is easy to develop for, it is intended > to make it easy to get started, but from base upward it is 100% custom. I > don't know what your particular needs are, but I would give WP a serious > look! Plus WP integrates well with any web app you could shake a stick at. In > summary chose a CMS that fits YOUR needs, my rants are what made WP a good > fit for me, yours are different so make a decision based on what YOU need, > not my needs! > > Riley Childs > Student > Asst. Head of IT Services > Charlotte United Christian Academy > (704) 497-2086 > RileyChilds.net > Sent from my Windows Phone, please excuse mistakes > ________________________________ > From: Daron Dierkes<mailto:daron.dier...@gmail.com> > Sent: 2/13/2014 9:52 PM > To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU<mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU> > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Python CMSs > > If you're new to python and django there will be a steep learning curve for > you, but probably a much steeper one for people after you who may not do > python at all. Drupal and Wordpress are limited, but non-technical > librarians can still get in pretty easy to fix typos and add links at > least.. Codecademy has a decent intro python course: > http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/python > Udemy has a few python courses with some django as well. > > A big reason why I've been learning django is to try to understand how our > library can work with the various DH projects that use our collections. If > we need to at some point take on permanent ownership of these projects or > if we want to develop them further, a basic familiarity on the part of our > library staff seems like a good idea.
