My personal website has been through countless iterations. It has now been developed in 3 different content management systems (CMSMS, WP, Drupal) - after being a completely static site for a number of years. I've talked about never being happy with my own website - it's a cycle. A horrible and amazing cycle of admiration, doubt, hatred, and striving to always do more.
Wordpress has been kind to me
For the last few years I've enjoyed developing in Wordpress. From laying-out best practices for designing themes to implementing custom-styled posts. Last year I took advantage of custom post types, utilizing the function for my work/portfolio. It worked for what I needed it to do. Ultimately, I always knew that Wordpress wasn't the ideal solution for longevity. All the customizations I did felt hacked-together. It has a great community, and some truly necessary plugins. Even with these admirable qualities I needed more. I no longer needed a really great blog with some more advanced features. When it came to styling individual posts, I didn't like the workflow - it felt hacked. I was using a stellar plugin called Art Direction. It utilized custom fields to insert your post-by-post CSS into, which would output the -style- tag in the -head- section of the full post page. This worked fairly well, and was an awesome solution at the time. I'd like to thank Trent Walton for answering a help/info request email. Since I started custom designing individual posts I wondered how long it would last. It took hours to design each post. I wasn't even scraping the surface of possibility with what I was doing. Many times I felt rushed and just put something up.
Wordpress will now be a tool I utilize at work, on client websites, and get my wp action on there. I will also continue hoisting the Wordpress flag in freelance client work.
A Drupal cometh
I've been developing in Drupal for the last 2 years and have become enamored with possibilities. I had the pleasure of attending Drupalcon 2011 in Chicago, and the first Twin Cities Drupal Camp in May. Both were incredibly rewarding and further cemented positive feelings about Drupal as a sustainable platform. For a few reasons, I always hesitated to install Drupal and use it for my personal site. Some of it was the technical differences between WP and Drupal. Drupal takes longer to configure and plan-out, both from a theming approach and design. There are more variables to consider - classes to re-use, more involved planning, and more facets to account for. I now have dominated this task.
Over the next few months I will be making tweaks to my site. For a starting point, I'm really happy with what I've accomplished.
Here's to Drupal.