Allan Saddi's projects blog

I guess.

I've worked on my Python "blog" project for a number of years now. If I remember correctly, under the hood, it started out using flat files for storage and CGI. Eventually I moved it to mod_python+Publisher, then to FastCGI+my own version of Publisher. Sometime before that, I switched to using PostGreSQL... eventually transitioning the site content and then the session data to the database. (The templating engine changed at least once. And of course eventually, came the switch of the whole webserver interface to WSGI.)

Anyhow, what I was aiming for was a user-customizable blog/forum site. Multi-column, a selection of premade components (such as polls and HTML boxes), user profiles, personal bookmarks, etc. It was pretty ambitious and it met most of those goals. Though little did I realize that if I just generalized my goals a bit, I would actually be creating a Content Management System.

I didn't come to that realization until I started playing around with CMS's recently. At first, being in my Java mood, I sought open source Java CMS's. I only stumbled across Lenya. I ran into some difficulty, and promptly tabled it. I figured there would be more Java CMS's out there. But I really didn't have much luck finding anymore... (ok, so I didn't try that hard, either)

I briefly looked at Plone (based on Zope). It seemed a bit overkill for what I wanted... and overtly complex. So I moved on the PHP-based projects. (Note that I eventually did try Plone. But my gut feeling was correct, especially compared to the PHP CMS's.)

So I decided to look at Joomla! and Drupal, based on all the hype around those projects. (Some of it good, some of it bad... i.e. security vulnerabilities that made the front page of Slashdot. )

I tried Drupal first and immediately fell in love. It was utterly simple to use and maintain. It was a breeze to set up multiple instances using the same installation. It had a whole array of 3rd party modules that did what I wanted. (And I found, it could do most of what I wanted out of the box already - I just had to enable the module.) Anyhow, I switched 3 of my (static) sites to Drupal to try it out.

Unfortunately, at this point, I never gave Joomla! a chance. I hear many good things about Joomla! pertaining to the ease of use (and the eye candy). But it had one fatal flaw in my eyes: it only supported MySQL. Hence the reason that I tried Drupal first...

As an aside, it's probably obvious, but I'm not a big fan of the L-M-P in LAMP. 1) I am and have been an avid FreeBSD user for the past decade. 2) I prefer PostGreSQL over MySQL, speed be damned. I like my transactions, thank you. 3) Whether the P stands for Perl or PHP, I'd rather have my apps written in Python and to some extent, Java.

Anyway, the only thing really missing (so far) from Drupal is a good CAPTCHA module. Solving a simple addition problem seems a bit simplistic. I'd be surprised if there weren't bots that could answer those CAPTCHAs already. And the image CAPTCHA support seems a bit lame, especially compared to the last CAPTCHA library I worked with, JCaptcha. Anyhow, I bring this up because even though I normally turn off user registration, I did forget to turn it off for one of my sites. Overnight, some 3-4 "people" (all using rather fake looking yahoo addresses) registered for my site. I'm sure if I had some actual content that you could post comments to, I'd also have a bunch of spam to take care of.

Anyway, one of the sites that was converted happens to be saddi.com. If I get more familiar/comfortable with Drupal, I'll probably be subsuming this blog into its Drupal instance.