Dries Buytaert

If you look at the source of University of Washington at Tacoma's new site, you'll immediately notice it's running Drupal. What's not immediately apparent, however, is the path they took to get it in place.

I recently got an e-mail from a member of the UW Tacoma web team, who explained that they migrated to Drupal from a home-grown system running on IIS and mostly based in ColdFusion. Their system often required manual editing of HTML for even the simplest of content updates, and synchronizing between development and live versions of the site was (as we all know) an ever present problem.

Sounds familiar? I've heard this story so many times.

The team looked into a Joomla based solution, as well as one based on Plone, but eventually gravitated toward Drupal due in large part to the helpful Drupal community. As I've always maintained, our software rocks, but our community is what continues to make Drupal a success.

The e-mail concluded with a great quote that I hope James Woods, its author, won't mind me including here: "Once I learned how to stop fighting Drupal and embrace the automagical function naming hooks, I've come to love Drupal.". I think that quote probably describes the experience of many, many Drupal developers.

Way to go, James, and congratulations to you and the rest of your team for a great looking site.