Welcome to the new look & feel of my site which runs on Drupal now. For those who are wondering what on earth is this Drupal. Please click on the Drupal link to visit their site and know about it in detail. In short, it's a content management software that helps build your site with minimum effort and time with the addad advantage of low maintainability in terms of time and money.

My myth shattered

Yes, I always used to think that the focus of the content management software is to organise and manage contents only and provide you a limited blog like look & feel. Last week, I happened to browse the themes section of Drupal and that's it - all my myth shattered. I realised that it has totally separated the data and presentation layer. The vast and varied collection of themes made me realise that the presentation part of the site can be controlled with minimal effort and provides ample of options. Sounds like best of both the worlds - content management system with the felxibitily of controlling the aesthetics of your site. And here I am with the new look of my site served by Drupal.

Little background

It's more than 3 years that I have added any content to my website. The foremost reason was my laziness but on second thought I was able to blame it to some other stuffs. I realised that I am a bit bored with the same look & feel of my site and wanted to improve it before adding any content to it. The look and feel was inspired by Morten's JavaScript Tree Menu and features quite static site. You may still access the old site by hitting here. Moreover, I could never figure out a good way of managing the content. Using a content management software was one of the options but I always thought that the CMS is poor at providing you aesthetically appealing look & feel.

Improving looks

For last couple of months I have been hunting for the resources on the Internet for improving the look & feel of my site. I browsed through the sites like Open Source Web Design, Open Web Design, Open Design Community, etc. for inspiration and choose couple them for my site as well. At one point of time I liked the site of Laura Taimila so much that I requested for his permission to use his design. I express my heartiest thanks to Laura as he granted me the permission and told me where to find the CSS file for the design. Interestingly, he himslef has changed the look of site now and is using Drupal. Still, you can find the design implementd in one of his projects Estetiikka.

Choosing a theme

I am quite excited by the idea that I can change the look and feel of the whole site just by choosing a different theme. I scanned the themes of the Drupal and choose Garamond for my site. I happened to like the theme because of its rounded edges and the gradient effects. I was very excited and started adding contents to my site. When I started adding images, I realised that the images mesh up the layout of the page if the image width was more than 500px. The reason was attributed to the fact that the theme was a fixed width theme. Scaling down all the image that I want to use is not like me - I want to keep the maintenance effort to minimum. I even tried to rescale the image by using the width property but browser scaling destroys the image quality. Moreover, I was restricting myself to a particular theme by doing so. Finally, I gave up the idea of using fixed width themes as I plan to use handful of images and graphics on my site. Thus, fluid themes are my choice of themes.

My impression about Drupal

This is the first article I am posting since I have put the basic bits of Drupal together. It's too early to comment but it sounds quite promising. Easy to install, fast learning curve, no need to know the internals and details of web authoring like html, css, etc. and lots of feature. I know and have used only limited features but looking at the modules and reviews, it sounds like a feature rich CMS.

Don't know how to back up my content if I need to migrate to some other CMS or how easy it is to manage the look & feel once the contents grow and with the complex html stories being posted. But, I promise to keep you guys posted about my experience with Drupal.