My (new) blog is almost finish. It runs Drupal. I’ve just finish coding the front-end for this new blog after I played around with Drupal and found it to be quite interesting and have all the features that I need. So, I made decision to abandon that code and switch to Drupal. This decision also influenced by the move within my company to switch to Drupal for our CMS solution from Plone. We are not moving yet but I think it’s a good idea for me to get more comfortable with Drupal internal/external stuff before the move.

I’m not blogging for a quite a long time. Time constraint and no tools that I’m really comfortable be the part of the reason why I lost interest in blog. Wordpress is great but the fact that it runs only on MySQL made me decide to stay away from it. But when I looked back through my old post from two years ago, I felt that I’m loosing the history of my life when not blogging. So I made a decision to wrote the tools myself, before I found Drupal. Some of the features that made me switch to Drupal:-

• MySQL and PostgreSQL support
• Easy theming
• Lot of modules + easy to create a new one
• RSS Aggregator (which I plan to wrote one and it’s almost finished)
• Multiple input format (the core comes with Filtered HTML, PHP code and Full HTML but more can be installed via modules.)
• Revision history

Setting up Drupal is quite easy but getting all my previous post (which is scattered through few mysql database and xml file) is not that easy. Thanks to Drupal easy to understand database schema, I’m able to come up with a simple script to migrate all the post to the new Drupal database schema. The scattered posts already in one postgresql db when I try to wrote the frontend for this blog, so all the script need to do is to parse out all the content into Drupal’s schema.

Drupal comes with multipe input formats with Filtered HTML, PHP code and Full HTML were in the core. Other format such as BBCode, wiki, Textile and Markdown can be installed through modules. I settled down for Markdown syntax which I feel more natural. I prefered wiki style but the one in Drupal which is based on PHPWiki is not to my taste. Using Markdown however I lost the ability to link through page title as offered by the wiki.

The theme that I’m using currently still suffered few problems, notably unable to display the Preview before posting and misplacing the content element in admin interface. I’m not looking into it yet but soon I’ll decide wether to continue using this theme or ported the theme for my first blog which I really like it. With Drupal using the PHPTemplate engine, I don’t think porting the theme would be a hard task, just need to spend some time on it.