Xoops to Drupal

I'm about 95% sure than in August I'm going to move this site from Xoops to Drupal. I don't expect there will be any site downtime when I do and I don't expect that people will need to re-register. But it does mean that the UI and some of the URLs will change.

I'll post more information here once I actually start getting the content migrated.

More information on why I am making this move below the cut.

As I've stated before, I started this site as a way to learn about CMSes (Content Management Systems). We were discussing using one at work and I wanted a site to experiment with. I have an utter lack of imagination and am not capable of really experimenting with a technology unless I have something to actually build, so I decided to build a site on bread baking. I wasn't certain I was going to actually maintain the site, but initial reactions were positive so I decided to stick with it.

I tinkered with a few CMSes before settling on Xoops. I was able to get the site up and running in just a few days and was generally impressed with how complete Xoops was.

As time went on I realized that Xoops is rather buggy and difficult to customize. A lot of simple things, like being able to control the URL of a page, do not work in Xoops. Other things, like the blogging module, are extremely clunky and difficult to customize. I don't want to be ungrateful or bash Xoops as put me light years ahead of building the site from the ground up, but I have to say that Xoops has not turn out to be as good a fit for this site as I had hoped.

About 2 months after this site went live I discovered Drupal and fell in love. Drupal really is part of the next generation of CMSes. It is easier to manage, easier to customize, better managed as a project (for example, for a given piece of functionality they'll have one well maintained module to support it, versus 6 or 7 modules of varying quality for Xoops), and in nearly every way superior to the previous generation of CMSes. It also has a ton of momentum right now and looks like it is really going places.

I expect there will be a little bit of pain during the migration, with some things people have gotten used to on this site changing. But I expect that afterward this site will be cleaner, less buggy, and hopefully easier to navigate and manage than the current site. So please bear with me. I will make the migration as smooth as I can.

Stay tuned for more.