Evaluation of Drupal

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Evaluated version: 4.4.0 (April 2004)

Excites:

installation -- up and running in cca 10 minutes, incl. solving localisation etc. issues
taxonomies and menus -- fairly simple and efficient system to create hierarchies on the website
has revisions of pages and posts
flexible user + permission management (groups as well, but the module has to patch the core)

Grumbles:

installation -- the db creation script does not count with db prefixing, the database.mysql has (for obvious reasons) hard-coded table names and the INSTALL does not warn about this
localisation -- must manually add a column (!) to a db table to enable new locale... Date formats only American (missing d.m.Y) ... No localisation part in admin interface: how do I create a new locale? Aha, turn "localisation" module on first... hmm...
templating -- how do I ... ? Would like to create templates for index pages and content pages, but cannot find where/how. Reason: don't want the "Submitted by administrator on 21 April ..." tagline. OK, after 2hrs of peeking around, it's clear that (with the xtemplate themes at least) we can modify the layout of all pages in one template file; but having no knowledge of xtemplates, this is a trial-end-error...
website structuring -- menus based on taxonomies look fine, but it seems impossible to assign a page/story to a subcategory, i.e. so that it does not show in a parent category content (this not that weird requirement: we have <root> -> research/ -> groups/ hierarchy, and some pages belong to groups/ but should not show in research/ (not speaking about the title page...)). the only way is to hack - create flat one-level hierarchy which emulates tree via identifiers, and create one taxonomy term for one page.... summary: this is a blogging system, not a CMS.

PremekBrada: DrupalEvaluation