Does anything rhyme with Drupal? In my Drupal inspired sleeplessness of late, this is what obsesses me, given that I couldn’t work out anything else about this so called miracle CMS. You can’t think of one can you?? It’s like the word ‘purple’ or ‘orange’. It stands alone in the wilderness of the English lexicon and as far as I’m concerned deserves its linguistic isolation. As a non-programming savvy designer, Drupal has managed to do what people have not: reduced me to a teary, GIBBERING SHELL OF MY FORMER SELF.
I first heard of Drupal at a recent conference where Daniel Ben-Horin, of CompuMento and Techsoup spoke about its alleged capabilities. Then the word seemed to be everywhere. Drupal here Drupal there. It made bold and luscious claims.
Given my obsessive and infinite search for the holy grail of software to solve our community’s multimedia woes I foolishly began trying (…and trying and trying and trying…) to understand and learn it. I tried to read the impenetrable mountain of stuff written about it online, I badgered colleagues to help this lame and clueless designer. I even resorted to seeking out strangers who had actually slayed the Drupal dragon. But alas no matter how much or how hard I tried I got nowhere fast. After the wonderfully visual interface of Dreamweaver, Drupal looked like a spaghetti of text that had nothing intuitive to redeem it.
Is it a girl thing? or is it just a me thing? There is nothing quite like the inability to master a software program that renders grown hitherto intelligent, capable adults into blubbering, shuddering foetal messes. But in my favour (?) I have inherited my sheep herding Greek father’s legendary obstinacy (I’d like to think it’s tenacity) which manifests in an inability to let go of something till I can master (defeat!!!!) any dragon that dares to flare its flame at moi!!
This however has entailed many, many nights of mad mouse clicking and hitting the enter key like I was throwing balls at a fairground pile of tin cans. Blind, clueless shots yielding equally clueless results, results that had no resemblance to anything logical or predictable. Nodes? Indecipherable paths, theme intractability, image placement impossibility, modules????? If a god exists why did it not extend a loving arm in my hour of needy futility???
However, in the wee small hours of yesterday, on the threshold of admitting defeat, something akin to a Lourdes miracle began to materialise. Not because of any understanding based on logic but on sheer Pavlovian repetition. I had found that when I selected and clicked certain elements in the program in a particular sequence something resembling a page began to emerge from the quagmire of the Drupal swamp. Armed with this glimmer of hope I repeated these sequences, time and time again hoping to engrave these behaviours as deeply and as permanently into the grooves of my very, very exhausted grey mass as possible.
Today, I still claim that Drupal is a nightmare for the non-programming savvy beginner to understand but I am prepared to tread lightly into its murky terrain because intuition tells me that this is a mistress that is playing hard to get but might be worth the chase.
