Life on the Spot! Life and Leisure in Doha, Qatar

Before getting our domain “Life on the Spot”, I’ve been trying to decide if I’d go for a full content management system like Drupal or a blogging software like Movable Type. I’ve consulted a friend and discussed what would be the best solution for my planned website. Looking at Drupals’ documentation, one can see how powerful this free opensource software  providing you the luxury of maintaining user database, forums, blog capabilities, calendars and the like. I’ve even installed apache2triad (another opensource software which installs apache, MySQL and PHP in one package) on my machine as a prerequisite to get Drupal up and running locally. I was also able to get my hands on Drupal:Creating Blogs Forums Portals and Community Websites and used that to install and configure apache2triad. In minutes my local site was running flawlessly. It is indeed a powerful CMS solution which can even be used in a business environment. However, looking at my needs and the amount of time to develop my own templates, I decided to go with Movable Type as I deemed it was easier to configure and easier to create templates for (not really). It would also give Mavis an easier time to post her articles than using the full featured Drupal.

But that doesn’t stop my interest with Drupal. Sandro and I are now trying to start a forum project using Drupal in which the site would cater to Filipino expats in Qatar and those interested in going to Qatar. We’re hoping that we’d be able to get this thing going soon but we been both busy as I’ve been moving and developing this site while on his part, they’re preparing for his son’s birthday this coming Saturday. Give us more time and I’m sure we’d be able to make use of Drupal as intended.