If you are planning a non-trivial website, this twenty-five minute presentation by Paul Albert, Digital Services Librarian at Weill Cornell Medical Library which compares Drupal, a free Web Content Management System and Application Framework, to FatWire, a proprietary Web CMS, should be required viewing.

Many of the arguments presented here in favour of Drupal also apply to any of a number of popular free systems, and most of the arguments against FatWire apply to any proprietary system. In this case the systems were evaluated for their suitability for use by a Medical Academic Library, but any situation where management of a great deal of information via the Web is required might be considered broadly comparable. The staff at Weill Cornell Medical Library found that:

• Drupal is and will be cheaper
• Drupal is robust, extensible, and enterprise ready
• Other departments in their college are already using Drupal, as are other colleges and libraries, and many are dropping equivalent proprietary systems
• Drupal supports "perpetual beta" (continuous improvement of a site)
• Drupal has a much more active support and development community, and "a culture of sharing solutions"
• Drupal has been paired with other technology in proven ways
• Drupal has a gentle learning curve (compared to other development environments)

Update:  This course has been postponed until later in the year. Stay tuned!

Do you have a website yet? Learn to create, manage, and run your own website in this compresensive, 1 day course. We will create your website and teach you all you need to know to use the Drupal content management system.

• Configure Drupal for a basic small business "brochureware" site or personal blog.
• Manage users and user-contributed content for interactive or community sites.
• Use Drupal's taxonomy and menu systems to develop an information architecture for larger sites.

Haven't blogged here for a while, so I thought I should mention for the record that I think this is a development of world-shaking importance, in order to in future gloat about how precient I am.

Drupal allows you to define multiple navigation menus for your site. The theme for your site also reserves regions where these menus may be displayed. Typically themes reserve a place for what are called "Primary Links" and "Secondary Links", as well as multiple regions for blocks, which may also contain menus.