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It's me and Drupal 7 again. It feels a little odd going through the process of setting up two Content Management Systems (CMS) at the same time: Drupal and DotNetNuke. However, this has given me more insight into the design and use, and the pros and cons of each. I will have to caveat this by saying that I am setting up another site using Drupal 7, which was released on January 5, 2011, after a much delayed and widely proclaimed development period. As I mentioned in the last blog post, I was particularly interested in the accessibility aspects of the new release.

Drupal 7, D7, has proven to be a very capable system, however, it does take a while to get the hang of how the pieces fit together. The core components are very cohesive and seem to be well developed. There are some notable absences though, such as SMTP email. That does seem too much to ask, since every system I have ever had anything to do with, since email was in widespread use, has had some sort of SMTP library. Then of course, D7 is...

In an effort to learn about more content management systems, having already set up and formatted a Joomla site, I decided to try Drupal. I had heard a good bit of praise about it, especially in the area of accessibility. In my day job, I am required to make websites and online documents conform to the Section 508 guidelines. Any review of said guidelines will leave the reader with a confused look. Granted it is old and soon to be replaced, but it is still the requirement of the day. So, I determined to conform to the loftier WCAG 2 standard, which the new 508 is supposed to approach. The results are good and the direction much more clear. The real rub is to get document contributors to do the initial work like use proper headings, captions and formatting.

Drupal 7 was to be released on January 5, 2011. I saw that many of the module authors had committed to having their modules ready for D7 on the release date. Since it had been about 3 years since the project started, It looked very promising. I waited....