When you get into website building and maintenance, you soon realize that there is no such thing as a “good system for website building and maintenance”. Instead, there are solutions that are “good for this, but not good for that”. You have to choose between different sets of virtues and flaws, so you get the capabilities you need while living with its problems.
You choose the right tool for the job.
Drupal is a good tool. Even more, Drupal is a great tool, an awesome tool. Awesome for what?
When you start realizing Drupal's almighty power, you think “i can do everything”, and yes, you can, but should you? You can drive a tank to go to granma's house, but you don't do it. Your car, a motorcycle or even a bike makes much more sense.
So, Drupal is a great tool, no question about that, but maybe it's not the right tool for your project. Being good per se is not enough.
Okay, I get the idea. Now, where's the beef?
Remember Bruce Lee saying "be water, my friend"? Drupal is amazing at eating up and recombining information in all shapes you can imagine. For Drupal, information is like water, it can take whatever shape is needed, and managed exactly the way you want.
· You can build custom structures for your information with no coding skills (CCK module). You want a list of sport clubs, teams and players? Go with it. Real estate? No problem. Vintage cars, including if they work or not, and what needs to be repaired? Easy shot.
And this is even better: you can change this structure later, once the site is up, working and full of content.
· You can show this info to users the way you want (Views module). It's not just about information, but about information in a form that is useful for you. For example, imagine you have a list of people that want to visit the Alhambra. As the organizer of the event, you want to know exactly how many people will need translator, or who has already paid, and you want to see any of these things at a glance. This is soemthing Drupal Views does really, really well.
· You can establish relations between those information chunks you just created. You can relate content types ot other content types, share info between them, consider info from users when showing content, etc.
· Drupal is social. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, other Drupal sites, you name it. Drupal has the ability to play nice with the outside world, and get and send information to external sources the way you want, and give it the “shape” you want.
Understood? OK, now, go out and “be water, my friend”.
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