I read this post the other day and found it really inspiring - so many things to do and learn…

http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/my_secret_agenda_for_php_content_management_systems/

Links within that blog that I found especially interesting

Drupal is a very flexible CMS which can be extended to provide the functionality needed for may different types of website.

I’ve worked on a few projects where I was brought in for my Drupal expertise, but in the end felt that Drupal wasn’t a good solution in these particular circumstances. So I’ve been pondering what sorts of projects is Drupal best suited to.

I’ve been working in the CMS arena for 10 years, and the whole time I’ve been expecting one or more “industry standard” CMS’s to come along, but instead we’ve seen thousands of competing products with almost every web agency claiming to have CMS product.

While development costs have come down a long way due to greater experience and code re-use they still haven’t come down anywhere close to the level that people are used to from purchasing shrink-wrapped mass market software.

Clients have been getting fed up of high costs and vendor lock-in.

In this context I’ve seen many clients specifying Drupal as a requirement when putting projects out to tender – in the hope of saving cost and avoiding lock in.

Any complex website that needs updating has to be tested without affecting the users of the live site.

The challenge then is how to replicate the changes made on your test site on the live site.

If all the changes are in code then version control systems such as svn and cvs solve this problem very neatly.

But with a CMS such as Drupal some changes are inevitably required in the database.

Managing these changes without affecting the site content can be tricky.