Though the visual tweaks are few, the plumbing on this site is completely new -- Drupal 5, with a lot more best practices, better code, and better templates. The process to get here highlights a few of the things that I love, and hate, about Drupal.

Recently, I've become somewhat enamored of Django. Django is like a hammer and a bucket of nails -- you pick them up, and build what you want. Drupal is like a car that you buy, or a house someone else built. You didn't have to build it, but you also don't get to pick where the cabinets go, and changing where they go might cost a few bucks and take a little time.

It is always nice to do it yourself if you want serious control. But it can be nice to go along for the ride, too.

Despite being tied to a yucky language, Drupal's future seems realtively bright. Architecturally, the project is largely becoming more sane, and there's a good chance some of the inconsistencies of the API and theming will be worked out in upcoming versions.  

Currently it is too much of a hodge podge of notions about how a CMS and development platform should work. There's too much magic, and too many pre-rendered elements returned to themes (I discussed this a bit with Jeff Eaton on Lullablog).

A simple but telling case: Drupal provides a node object which has no methods at all, yet it provides forms as an array.  Why the inconsistency?  Similarly, the Javascript content that feeds into $scripts with drupal_get_js() is hard to manipulate.  The list could go on for miles.

So I've been cursing Drupal these past few days as what I hoped would be a 10-12 hour project ballooned into a 36 hour project. But then I started migrating the old content over, and I remembered what I liked -- a flexible, logical system that is well suited to content-heavy websites.