Sunday, March 08, 2009

Drupal reminds me of Google Page Creator

My now moldy vintage 1994 personal web site [1] was created using Microsoft FrontPage, especially FrontPage 98. That was an impressive piece of software for working with document-oriented web sites, unfortunately there's nothing like it around today. The closest thing to FrontPage today, curiously, is Microsoft's Sharepoint 2007 wiki.

FrontPage 98 still runs. In fact, I recently connected it to the XP SP2+ IIS-based personal web server. Unfortunately, it doesn't run on my current platform of OS X (save in emuliation of course).

So I've been looking for replacements, albeit sluggishly. Since even Dreamweaver seems to be a relic of another age I thought I'd look at Drupal, an open source "content management system" -- meaning a web app for authoring web pages.

It was easy to add to one of my DreamHost domains - it's a free one click install there. I had it up and running in (really) less than a minute.

Alas, even though DH claims that they'll keep it current it's already one big security update behind (so no links from here!).

Still, I was able to play with it. It reminds me of the late midly lamented Google Page Creator -- except that there's no rich text editor. In fact, the Firefox editing window I'm typing this into is far more powerful than a Drupal editing window.

I'll keep poking around, but I sure do miss FrontPage ...

[1] In one form or another I've maintained a continuous Internet presence since 1994. Holy cow.

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