New CMS Introducing Drupal!

Here at Snakeoil we've been using b2evolution since inception. b2evolution was a fork of b2/cafelog created by François Planque. WordPress is also a fork from the b2/cafelog project.

Ergo we can say effectively b2evolution and WordPress are cousins.

Unfortunately b2evolution development has ceased around Covid, and nobody has picked up the project since. As technology rages on, it is inevitable b2evolution will become abandon ware.

For example it's unlikely to work with PHP 8.x, the base of modern Linux distributions.

This is the main reason why we have not blogged in nearly 3 years. A move to a new CMS has to be made, but to what?

Over the years I have played with Joomla and WordPress (🤮) but both systems just do not feel right. b2evolution is really a good piece of software and to find something that can replace it is very difficult. 

Over the past couple of years I have also tried Drupal, but it's really difficult to learn how to  use. But since last December I have some spare time on my hands - and decided to pick up Drupal in earnest. Sad (happy?) to say I have finally crossed the hurdles. All up I this new CMS has already underwent 2 software updates and everything went perfectly.

I am finally comfortable enough with this CMS to drop b2evolution in favour of Drupal.

Migration still took an additional 2 months of work. Not blogging for the past 3 years certainly reduced the amount of content that needs to be ported.

We're also using a new web server to power Drupal - Nginx! The old mediawiki and b2evolution sites are no longer online as Drupal have stepped in and replaced their roles.

A lot of planning has gone into this migration, and it is a big relief to report everything is working - after I open up the site to the Internet (previously the Drupal site is restricted to my local IP address).

Drupal is hard to learn, but that's because it is so extensible and configurable. It begins with a US$39 payment to get a Drupal theme and sample data (this saved me weeks of learning time), and ends at where we are today - a blog post since June 2022!🍾🎉