Nick.pro Migrated to Drupal

I have successfully migrated the nick.pro site from the WordPress blog that it has been for ages, into Drupal. This is perhaps the most unusual migration of this blog (and I’ve moved this blog several times now), in that I don’t actually consider Drupal to be a better blogging software than WordPress, in fact, I find WordPress to be the absolute best blogging software available today. However I’ve long wanted nick.pro to be something more than just a blog, I’ve wanted it to be a whole site showcasing what I’m up to online and off, and Drupal is a far better CMS platform for a more robust site than just a blog.

While Drupal works fine as a blog, where it really shines is in its flexibility. There are Third Party Modules available to do almost anything you can imagine, and for those things, you can’t imagine, it’s a robust php framework for coding my own modules to do even more incredible things.

For the moment, all I’ve accomplished is migrating my old blog content, making sure all of the URLs redirect correctly, and adding an activity stream to show my recent activity on various online sites (twitter, digg, youtube, and flickr to start, more to come).

This is far from the first time I have migrated my blog. Stay tuned after the break for a brief glimpse of how this site has progressed from “Cap’s Log” on Movable Type 2, to Nick.pro running on Drupal today.

Originally, this blog (which used to be a subdomain of subspacelink.com) ran on Movable Type 2, which at the time was an excellent platform (and still is in its version 4 update). At the time I was primarily a Perl developer, so it made sense to standardize on a Perl platform, I quite enjoyed finding Plugins for MT and even writing a few of my own.

Nearly a full year after the blog launched, I made its first major migration to BLOG:CMS, which is based on the Nucleus CMS Blogging platform. My primary reason for this migration was that I could no longer upgrade Movable Type without paying a license fee, and as I much preferred Open Source software, I decided the time had come to migrate to a new platform.

Unfortunately Nucleus never quite seemed a clean enough system for me, and BLOG:CMS made it much messier, and upgrades to new versions were a real pain, so I was always on the lookout for another blogging platform to switch to.

The Nucleus system was such a pain to work with, that eventually I just stopped blogging entirely, and there came a point where there was a space of over 15 months with not a single post. Eventually, I Migrated to WordPress in May 2006 and used it continually until today.

As I said above, WordPress is a phenomenal blogging software, the best there is, and I will miss some of its simplicity and functionality on my site now that I have Gone Drupal, but the time has come that I want more out of my personal site than a blog, and Drupal will give me the flexibility I need to do much more with my site than ever before.