As Gina kindly pointed out to me recently, my blog promises overlong tangents about Drupal, but hasn't delivered lately. Since my first-year anniversary of working with Drupal is coming up, I thought I'd change that and share my experiences so far.

I came to Drupal as a PHP/MySQL programmer and a bit of a snob about building sites from scratch. My primary concern was that a mature CMS would be too constricting, that it would keep me from doing things I wanted to do, or else those things would require complex, time-wasting workarounds.

I've noticed that the Interest Tags system is not really clicking as well as it should here on IndieBound.org. A lot of users don't seem to understand what it's for, or how to use it. Bottom line: I don't blame anyone but me. If this isn't working, it's because it's not clear what it's for, or because it's not organized well enough. Back to the drawing board...

IndieBound.org is made of Drupal, an open-source web framework based on PHP. It is database-agnostic, which does NOT mean that it doesn't believe in databases—oh no, Drupal believes in databases, some would say too strongly—but it can interface with (potentially) any database through a key innovation called a database abstraction layer.

• September 2009 Indie Next List
• August 2009 Indie Next List
• July 2009 Indie Next List