The Drupal

It is starting to look like another sea-change may be upon us, we who toil in the Web trenches of UNL. Drupal is coming.

We started with a need to communicate our spoken language after the fact. Kewl! A few glyphs later we had a nice little written language we were quite proud of. We used it to print catalogs and schedules and letters and memos until we were crushed by the weight of all of that paper.

Then came the Internet, and with it the Web. And the Web was built of HTML.

Well, that’s all fine, but nobody knew HTML. To those not schooled in its ways, HTML was hard. HTML was tricky, like English. Always do this, except when you do that. That kind of thing. And the most popular Web browsers of the day didn’t agree on much. So you could spend $20 on a book that would teach you HTML, but by following along with the examples in the book you end up with... something else. So we had to make our Web pages even trickier to get pages that looked the same, or nearly so, in either browser.

So into this world there came to be Dreamweaver. And Dreamweaver remembered all of the arcane rules and situations for you. Dreamweaver took a lot of the drudgery out of building Web pages. And with each passing iteration, Dreamweaver got better and better at what it did, adding features no one could have dreamed of in Version 1.

But along the way, Dreamweaver became difficult. “I just want to change Friday to Thursday. Why should that be so hard?” Why, indeed?

One of the features of Dreamweaver was Templating. And Templates made a lot of things easier still. Entire areas of the page were locked down so that you could not edit them; you could not break your page. We went for Templates in a Big Way here, building page Templates for all kinds of situations, and offering training for anyone who came near a Web editor. But in their own simple way, the Templates were hard, too.

The Web is built of HTML. But HTML was too hard. So we got Dreamweaver. But then Dreamweaver was too hard (and to get the most of it, you really had to learn at least some HTML, too). So then Templates happened. Templates weren’t really hard, but you still had to know some Dreamweaver in order to get the most out of them, too.

Now it looks like we may be on to something. Drupal is a content management system that can work quite well with all of the constituent parts of a Dreamweaver Template file, building a page that looks exactly like it should, built of entirely valid markup and without error. And built through an interface not unlike what we have come to know and love in every word processor since the middle 1980s.

Point. Click. Sign-in. Point. Click. In a framework no harder to learn than 1984’s MacWrite, you can build and publish a Web page. Make it available in the navigation menu. Have it include photos, video, even. And it all works, and it all works well and for the most part it all seems to stay out of your way.

There is a tiny team at work today on bringing Drupal to bear on the task of publishing here at UNL. If their work is successful, we may no longer need to know anything of Templates, or Dreamweaver, or HTML. Or cost-object numbers, because the Drupal package is free. How cool might that be? At least, until something goes wrong. Then someone, somewhere, is still going to have to know something of Templates and Dreamweaver and HTML.

The future is going to be a great place to live. Probably.