Setting up a static front page with Drupal is very easy: look under Administer -> Settings -> General Settings -> Default front page and type the name of the page (say "node/31").
Laurent
On 11/9/06, Daniel O'Donnell daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca wrote:
Hi all,
I thought I'd report on my experiments with Content Management Systems for my professional web space.
I tried out Textpattern http://www.textpattern.com/ and Drupal http://www.drupal.org/. Both are open source, mysql- and php-content management systems. Drupal is by far the more widely used, more flexible, and customisable; textpattern is far more simple, somewhat limited in its organisation (it is really a blogging system that is transforming to a more general CMS). Both work under the major server software, and so are compatible with anything your university or IP is likely to be running.
I tried the two systems out on my home (debian/ubuntu linux) and University (a combination of Redhat enterprise linux and MS) servers using mysql. Textpattern set up extremely well under the two conditions (at home, I have root access to everything; at work, I have very limited privileges to the server or the database). Drupal was more problematic, and I never really did get it working exactly the way I wanted. I needed to hack one aspect of textpattern--I need a relatively static front page, and it is set up so the front page works as an RSS server--and I am having trouble with outputting search results. But otherwise I am very happy with it. I was also pleased that textpattern designers tended to use better CSS than drupal designers, though both allow you to use your own CSS.
I think if I were setting up a community site, I'd work at getting drupal to work: it looks like the more sophisticated program. For my professional homepage, though I had quite specific needs--good xhtml output, a wiki-based editor, and relatively painless set up. Apart from the hack, textpattern did everything I wanted.
Here's the URL to the new website if you want to see it: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/
There is very little content at the new site as yet, as I only added the stuff I absolutely needed right now. But adding material is extremely easy.
-dan
-- Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD Director, Digital Medievalist Project http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Chair, Text Encoding Initiative, http://www.tei-c.org/ Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Canada Vox: +1 403 329-2378 Fax: +1 403 382-7191
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