I've been playing with Drupal for a couple of days now, for several reasons.

- We have been using b2evolution for quite a while now, and while it is a very good blogging server, it would be interesting to see if there is anything better out there.

- It would be nice to have a system that could integrate our blogs, galleries, websites and so on.

And this is where I have spent a lot of time looking at what's available on the market based on the following criteria

- Has to run under OsX

- Should be opensource and written in PHP

- Should use MySQL as the database

- Has to support XMLRPC to allow Ecto for authoring content

- Has to allow me to extend the system through plugins and self-written code

After trying out a number of systems (there are a lot of them on the market) I ended up with Drupal on the shortlist, and started further testing. Here are some of my observations.

- Drupal is very easy to install, it has the least amount of manual configuration to get it up and running (1 line in a config file) and the best installation/configuration program around.

- It implements XMLRPC using MT or Metaweblog API's. In practice the Metaweblog API works best with Ecto on the Mac, even though I have found a few problems (bugs?) with their implementation, something I intend to look into before I report a bug.

- Ectos implementation of Technorati tags works for external crawlers, but does not make it into the taxonomy tag fields in Drupal. Again this could be fixed - so I will look at writing a plugin to fix this.

- Drupal blog code seems to be a lot snappier than b2evolution code, and I am convinced that Drupal scales a lot better than b2evolution, which has some serious scaling issues in the way it uses MySQL.

- Drupal runs perfectly on OsX, but you really need at the very least to add the GD PHP library to use some of its functionality.

- Drupal works with Gallery out of the box.

WebMetrics.

This is where Drupal fall far short of b2evolution - the statistics available are bad, and even worse, the collected statistics are very basic and lacking in detail. The last part is a real problem, as there is very little that can be done without decent material.

The difference can be seen easily by these 2 screendumps, the first one from b2evolution, the last from Drupal.

(Click for larger)

This is not good enough for me - but it looks like I will have to add quite a bit of code to first of all log the necessary information, and then to display it.

More later...

Technorati Tags: b2evolution, blogging, drupal, Ecto, MacMini, osx, PHP, Webmetrics, xmlrpc

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