Drupal

I just went live with the Chicklet Books web site (www.chickletbooks.com). This is the first fully-customized site I've implemented using my new favorite toy, Drupal.

Drupal is magic. It's my preferred Content Management System for clients who need a robust and feature-rich Web solution, without the custom-development price tag. The Chicklet and I selected Drupal because she wanted a very feature-rich site with message boards and an interactive community that she could update without my intervention.

Content Management is what allows you update information on your web site without knowledge of HTML. With just a little training, you'll be able to perform a lot of routine site updates all on your own.

IMHO, Drupal is the best open-source content solution out there. That's important because if there's something you want your web site to do - for example, maintain an events calendar - someone has probably already thought of that and written the program ('module') to do it. With a little configuration and setup, the new functionality magically appears on your site and you're ready to go - and best of all, the module is freely available. It's good practice to make a donation to the developers of open source applications - why else would they spend their time tinkering around making all these useful things for us?

Drupal is wildly customizable or can be quickly implemented with any one of hundreds of pre-built open source templates. I have implemented and am maintaining several sites on this platform, and my clients are uniformly thrilled with the functionality and their ability to independently update the site on a whim.