Blogging for Drupal

This is a guest post from Mitchel Xavier. Mitchel Xavier is a Drupal Developer for a Drupal web design company in Sydney, Australia.

Drupal is usually not the first CMS that comes to mind when considering which platform to use for blogging. Wordpress has certainly become the platform of choice for blogging. If you are creating an enterprise website which requires advanced functionality, then Drupal may be the best choice. If you plan to incorporate a blog into your existing Drupal website, it is worthwhile to stick with Drupal, since Drupal has very advanced blogging features.

Drupal is one of the strongest CMS systems around. One of its main strengths is its flexibility. It has extremely flexible taxonomy and content type functionality. In terms of taxonomy, you can create a hierarchy of unlimited levels of categories and tags, which is very useful for blogging. These can also be assigned to different content types as required. For content types, the CCK module makes it easy to create new content types without requiring a developer.

Drupal also has powerful user management features. Access control functionality allows complete control over roles and permissions. Configuration of users provides the ability to assign users access to particular roles and these roles can be defined as required. In a blogging environment, this means that all roles including read-only members and publishers can be easily configured as desired.

This flexibility means that Drupal can be expanded to include feature rich features and functionality. The main point here is that expanding a Drupal blog feature set can be specifically tailored to your particular requirements, rather than standard functionality, which often restricts Wordpress websites. In this respect, Drupal surpasses Wordpress.

However, Drupal has some disadvantages when it comes to blogging. Wordpress has the ability to filter out spam and is extremely effective. Drupal’s spam capabilities are not as strong. Wordpress is also built for blogging from the ground up. Out of the box, Wordpress just works as a blog, whereas Drupal requires some setting up.

Drupal’s advantages are strong reasons to use Drupal for blogging. There are many blogging modules, which automatically create your blog functionality. These can be viewed with a blog module search. If you want to use a blog module, read through their descriptions and try a few, to decide which one works best according to your preferences.

Using Drupal blog modules can have some restrictions. These modules are not the only option for blogging in Drupal. Drupal core can be set up for blogging and setting it up without a blogging module will make your options more flexible. The important features of a blog which can be setup includes posts with multiple categories, tagging, dating of posts with sorting ability, RSS feed and the ability to navigate the blog via categories, tags, recent posts, archives etc., with a sidebar for navigation.

A frontpage blog can be created in Drupal in the following way. Stories can be assigned to “promote to frontpage” in global settings. Ensure that the vocabulary for tagging blog posts with the terms of your choice and assigning it to the story content type. Stories can then be assigned to blog posts.

If you are already using Drupal for your website, blogging functionality can easily be integrated. The major decision to be made is whether to use a blogging module or to create the blogging functionality using Drupal’s core functionality. It is worthwhile trying all the options to see which option works best for your requirements.