Drupal 6.2 first impressions

After a couple of previous abortive attempts to get to grips with Drupal I'm pleased to report that I've finally gained a foothold with version 6.2. I've persevered with Drupal because the evangelical praise from its disciples convinced me there must be something in it that I was just too stupid to see.

A lot of open-source web products can be installed in seconds from cPanel using Fantastico. Not so Drupal. So I was delighted to find the excellent installation video from lullabot and more getting started help from Awakened Voice, with which I was up and running in a short(ish) time.

My reasons for using Drupal are: simply as a platform for my own web site (I'd tried Joomla when it was Mambo - it was fine but didn't wow me); as an exploration of an open-source candidate for client installations; and as a comparison of the more corporately marketed SharePoint which had been my bread, butter and bacon for the last couple of years. So here it is, already re-themed and making a surprising amount of sense to me on just its first day. I think it's going to be OK.