With so many great and award winning content management systems on the market it can be difficult to choose the right one for a project or for a company to use as the basis for its sites. It's a big enough topic that articles have been written and books published on the topic. But, I think there is a more basic decision that needs to be made before the selection can be considered. One that tells you about your plans for using the system.

In the current state of CMS you can't have your cake and eat it, too. That is, you can't have everything you may want out of the box. You need to make a base decision about what you want. Basically, choose two of the following three:

• Flexibility
• Slick UI
• Install and Setup Ease

Let's take a look a couple real world examples using Wordpress and Drupal. Read more »

Comment spam seems inevitable. Every blog, podcast, or site that I've run that allowed comments turned into a place for comment spam. Over the years I've tried numerous methods to kill the spam and most of them either didn't work very well or stole too much of my time to deal with something annoying. After dealing with this problem for several years I now have a setup that manages most comment spam with little work on my part. Read more »

Most web developers don't care much for Internet Explorer. When they build out websites and web applications they use Firefox and maybe Safari or Chrome. Internet Explorer is typically only used for testing to make sure everything works. This process can work out well but, what often happens in this process is that Internet Explorer becomes a second class browser citizen. The user experience for someone using Internet Explorer becomes secondary and they often get a weaker experience. Read more »

Until recently, I had come to the conclusion that web forums were dead. When it came to new sites or conversations about web technologies forums were something I avoided all together. Forums just didn't seem to fit within the current paradigm of web technologies and there seemed to be better ways to have the same kind of communication. That was until recently when I saw a variation of forums that works in this new paradigm. Read more »

I've had to use IE 6 for a long time. Spending over 6 years working for a large corporation where everyone used it and now working to build websites that need to function and look good in it. After spending all this time working with and using IE 6 I've come to realize that it's not a bad browser and I can prove it. Read more »

Wordpress is the top blogging platform. So, when I decided to build this blog I fully expected to use Wordpress and was really looking forward to it. As a full time Drupal developer it's inspiring to use a different tool. This gives me a chance to use a different and refreshing user interface, see under the hood of a different source code, and be inspired in my daily developing.

But, when I looked over my resources and requirements it turns out Wordpress was not the best fit for this site. Since a big part of engineering web applications is starting with the best tools for your task (or at least the best as far as you can tell) here is why I chose Drupal instead of Wordpress. Read more »