I spent the last week setting up Drupal as the CMS for my web properties. It wasn't the only choice, Mambo was a possibility, and of course Joomla. Just look at WikiPedia for a huge list of CMS systems. I chose Drupal because I had heard it was good, and the blogosphere seemed to agree, I saw a pretty even-handed presentation at Google Video and in the end, you just need to go for it.

My current webhost is SingHost who run the usual cPanel-driven hosting environment and Fantastico for script installations. I used Fatastico and quickly had a Drupal v5.4 install up and running. There are loads of themes and modules available via Drupal.org but I tried to focus on substance and used a library book to guide my experimentation.

What I didn't expect was to quickly give up and trash the whole install. You see, Fantastico has great market share and is easy to use but it's not always up to date, or perhaps more precisely, ISPs are not contemporary enough. Drupal5 is at v 5.7 and D6 is already at v6.1. I knew I wanted some of the taxonomy features and I quickly decided to abandon D5 and install D6.1 myself, manually.

This turned out to be no drama at all. I didn't bother trying to do an upgrade, I just copy/pasted some of the text I'd put into D5 into a temp file and trashed the files and the database. The D6 installer flatters - it's so easy and pretty I felt almost knowledgable as I selected a few things and off it went.

The lack of D6-compatible themes is a bit of a drag as I don't want to start theme development just yet. I settled on Chameleon as a nice, simple design but have since cloned it into my own theme to tighten up the spacing and blocks. So it took about 2 days before getting into theme development.

I also found NodeWorks and Tagadelic. I was having a hard time figuring out how to get my custom <META> tags into the headers without hacking core code, but NodeWorks does enough to keep me happy. And the Tagadelic tag cloud might be a cool block when I get more content.

I am very impressed with my first few weeks with Drupal. I took a small risk in jumping to D6.1 before many modules and themes were ported but don't regret being on the better code base. The only thing really bugging me at the moment is that I can't create an account at drupal.org - I never receive the e-mail advising my password. The ironic part is that to report this, I need an account. D'oh!

All I need now is to copy the content in.