Drupal Migration
UPDATE: I have since migrated back from Drupal to my home brew MoinMoin Blog installation. In fact I believe that this is the last piece of content which I need to migrate.
Below are my experiences migrating from a wiki (MoinMoin) to Drupal. I'm still going forward so I'm obviously happy with Drupal, but there have definately been some disappointments, some of which I didn't expect. So for what it's worth ...
First the good about Drupal
First off I like that it's a blog tool, I've made various attempts at keeping a diary/journal/blog in the past and always failed cause it was a hassle ... so far I'm doing better with Drupal then I have with anything else in the past.
- I love the taxonomy system. it's still not quite right, and I'm not sure i can explain why. It's certainly getting better but it's just doesn't work quite quite right yet.
- I really like that it's easily themable. I was always fighting with Moin to change the way it looked ... and always felt like I was loosing the battle.
- I really like it's wide range of usability. I like that I can keep my bookmarks, photo galleries, blogs etc.
I like that I can cut'n'paste HTML into a Drupal story/book page it deals with it moderatly gracefully just stripping out all HTML that isn't allowed. I don't trust other peoples sites and documents to stay available ... so if I really want to be able to reference it in the future I tend to make a local copy, and it's really nice if it's available and searchable via whatever CMS I'm using. I've spent *lots* of time converting HTML to wiki markup by hand and it gets old
- I love that the developer community is friendly and open to new ideas, and always experimenting with how to do things better.
What I miss from wiki
Mostly what I miss is the inherent intertwingularity of a wiki. All the systems that wiki's have developed to intertwingle their data are hugely valuable. BackLinks, accidental linking, RecentChanges, Title and Word Indexes etc.
- I really miss the ease of wiki markup for data entry. I've used a lot of wiki's now, and I've found that I'll use a wiki page for documentation before any other method (before HTML, before a word file or text file). It's just easier.
- I like that my content was seperate from the markup. I didn't have to worry about generating correct HTML. If I want to change the way it renders I change the code/CSS and changes
- I love the simplicity of wiki, I know that simplicity is at odds with features which is what made me investigate Drupal to start with but I do feel that the attitude that wiki developers often had that simpler is always better worked well.
Now what I don't like
- I don't like that I have to do my writting in HTML. I don't want to have to think about whether I'm writing well formed HTML as I write, I just want to write. I find wiki mark up much easier to deal with this way, I've started writing my blogs in mozilla composer and then just cut'n'pasting the HTML into the Drupal text box.
- I don't like that many of the modules which I consider crucial to my adoption of Drupal (image, weblink,taxonomy_dhtml, traceback, referrer block etc) second class citizens
- Releases seem to get abandoned.