Migrating from WordPress

Blogs are great--for certain things. Radio Userland was exciting, and Blogger was a great improvement that added all kinds of power. WordPress is even better, and, as is always the case, being built with a new architecture on the experiences of other blogging systems, it is terrific.

Blogs have moved beyond the introspections of people (including some who aren't particularly interesting) to a whole genre of commentators on topics that are of interest to many (or a few) people -- the blogosphere. Through it all, blogs have become the absolutely simplest way to publish a Web site. Many of us jumped on the bandwagon and built our Web sites on blogs for just that reason.
Blogging software supports a commenting structure, RSS feeds, category tags and labels, as well as the ability to customize blog pages with HTML and other tools. But the basic aspect of blogs -- the chronologically ordered rolling list of entries, remains the heart. Content Management Systems (CMSs) seem to me to be the right tool for the next era of Web site development and maintenance. For my taste, Drupal is the leader, and that's why I've been experimenting with it for the last few months.
The migration from WordPress was simple, but it dramatically demonstrated the structural differences. All of the blog posts have been converted. They go back several years all the way to Radio Userland. (You can find them on Jesse's Blog and Recent blog posts where "recent" is by comparison to geologic time.) That done, the page-border links and HTML code such as Downloads were brought over manually.
Then, looking around the Drupal site which I sketched out, there's a lot of room for content and it's pretty sparse right now. Going forward, there will still be a blog for the things a blog does best, but we now have a lot of structured space for other issues. And -- finally! -- a solution to the tyranny of blogs in which entries scroll off the bottom before everyone has read them.
Welcome to Drupal, and please feel free to comment and email jfeiler@northcountryconsulting.com.