I have been building websites for a long time, longer than a human probably should. During my tenure as a down-in-the-trenches code monkey, I have worked with many flavors of website construction: plain ol' HTML/CSS, various n' sundry WYSIWYGs, and content management systems of varying degrees of user-friendliness. In the end, my conceit had always been that handcoding is best... it makes me feel smart, and I like it that way. Not every jerk can parse the gobbly-gook of heavily marked-up code, but I've always seen its inherent beauty... call me a romantic!

In the past, it was pretty easy to get people to see it my way. CMSes were clunky and inflexible and WYSIWYGs generated so much crappy "spaghetti code" that random visual weirdness was to be expected when the page compiled. My job security lay in the fact that I could get behind-the-scenes and make code tweaks and fixes... I was The Magician!

But that was a long time ago. Scalability and the need to make site-wide changes in a flash rendered handcoding inefficient and unreliable. This ushered in the age whereby I needed to bow to a CMS and work within its constraints. If a feature was buggy or missing altogether, the best I could hope for was a radically upgraded next-version of the product. It could be maddening, to say the least.

The open source movement has since come to the rescue! I am now building out a new corporate site from the ground up using Drupal... a CMS that is modular and easy to use. Being an open-source product means that many eyes and minds are working together to develop features and modules that allow the user to custom tailor a site that fits his needs, as opposed to having to shoehorn expectations into the constraints of a fixed commercial version of a CMS. I am beyond thrilled with what can be done with it, and I am still just scratching the surface.

Matt Butcher has created a Amplify Drupal module, which can analyze sentiment right on the individual page... check it out here, DrupalHeads! Hopefuly this is just one of many more Amp-powered tools that will be developed for this awesome platform.

I still like to think of my self as The Magician, but I rarely have to go too far under the hood with Drupal core files to make changes. A little PHP knowledge goes a long way, but is by no means required to leverage all the cool stuff that Drupal can do. Go forth and join the open source revolution if you have not already... it's the right thing to do!