Live, on Drupal
I've now successfully made the move from Wordpress to Drupal. The move was challenging at times, not the least of which I was so comfortable with Wordpress and was moving into a completely new environment. However, now that I'm finished and I've had a chance to look around, I'm happy I've taken the time—both in learning the new tool and in re-organizing my sites.
Drupal doesn't provide the out-of-the-box ease of Wordpress when it comes to weblogging. I wouldn't recommend Drupal to people who just want to set up a weblog and publish and are, more or less, happy with "standard" weblogging functionality. However, Drupal does provide the fine grained modularity and control that I both want and need. In addition, there's a different mindset in play with Drupal that appeals to me; including a stronger commitment to standard XHTML and other W3C specifications, as well as support for more formal taxonomies. After years of going back and forth about Semantic Web as compared to semantic web as compared to "Web 3.0", I've found I'm really not a microformats kind of gal. I really do like structure in my web sites.
To me, the extra time necessary to learn how Drupal works was more than justified by what I've been able to accomplish. Frankly, I would probably have spent as much time bitching about Wordpress as I took to become familiar with Drupal, and had a lot less fun, too.
Being critical of the tools we use is important—that's how they improve. However, if most of our communications about a tool are negatively critical, than it's time to move to a different tool. Product "loyalty" isn't, when you're forcing the developers of the tool to continuously stop their efforts in order to answer your criticisms. We only have to look at the recent fooflah over Twitter to see the wisdom of knowing when to stay, and when to leave.
Though my experiences may not be similar to others, I thought I would detail the steps and decisions I made when moving from Wordpress to Drupal. I'm not an expert at Drupal, so I can't guarantee the steps I took are the right ones, but they seem to work for me.
Comments
It's interesting that your book's subpages don't seem to allow comments. Only this main page does.
Anyway, I was curious if you'd looked at Zen for your Themes. It claims "If you are building your own standards-compliant theme, you will find it much easier to start with Zen than to start with Garland or Bluemarine." I certainly found that to be true.
I didn't turn the comments on in the individual pages, just the top page.
I liked the look of Garland, which is why I subthemed off of it. I'm not a real wizbang page designer, and if I can piggy back on a design, I will.