Tag: drupal

Over at IdeaLab, I’ve posted a bit of background on why I ended up building ReportingOn in Django instead of Drupal.  Frankly, to the users of the site, it shouldn’t matter which platform I chose, but to me, and to the future of the project as an open source basis for news organizations, I think it matters a great deal.

Here’s a clip from the IdeaLab post:

“Did I need the structure Drupal came with for users, posts, archives, feeds, and comments? Probably. But there was a whole bunch of other baggage, like all the WYSIWYG block and module organization that I wasn’t as comfortable with. My first instinct was to start from scratch and build my own theme, but I quickly realized I needed to build my own content types. And views. And the file system was confusing to me, coming from WordPress. Plus, although the Drupal community is full of awesome people building awesome modules, I still couldn’t figure out how to do a few simple things, like create a content type with a maximum length (say, 140 characters).”

Bonus: Django is fun, challenging in a productive way, and I know a ton of people working and playing with it.