I've had three full months' experience with Site Build It! (SBI!) at the beginning of this year and now I am on my second month of Drupal. I feel I can adequately and fairly review each Content Management System (CMS) as a newbie webmaster who has no programming experience and only very limited scripting experience. (Scripting -- or, more accurately, "skripting," as in "skript kiddie" -- is as different from real computer programming as a high school basketball player is from an NBA one.) The following look-back reflects not only on the two CMSes but who I am -- and had been -- and how Drupal and SBI! serve two different kinds of users.

Just the FAQs

All you need to know is that a CMS is simply software which organizes information ("content") in a way that makes it relatively easy to work with. Think of a phone directory, entries in alphabetical order -- logical, right? Yet for just a few numbers, a simple 3x5 Post-It Note would suffice.

Same deal with CMSes and the websites they handle. Simple websites with fifteen, twenty, even thirty pages probably won't really need a CMS to oversee their workflow, but big sites of hundreds or even thousands of pages will get out of hand without one. For example, let's say the copyright that's in the footer of every page needs to be changed (due to yet another corporate merger, whatever): editing each one "by hand" is tedious, but feasible enough in the case of small sites; those with thousands of pages could require days of mind-numbing editing and double-checking -- but with a CMS, it would be a one-time edit of a few seconds!

But that's not all a CMS does; for newbies, a CMS is an easy way to get a basic website up and running within a day, without any programming know-how whatsoever. It becomes a fairly simple procedure akin to good ol' word processing; indeed, most heavy-duty word processors nowadays can render webpages -- but not organize them, which is the other part of web development, and which returns us to the main reason for using a CMS: management.

Talent, directed

No matter how pretty and talented a starlet you might be, you'd almost always still need an agent, at least at first. This is much more so the case when it comes to websites. You can have a great idea for the next YouTube, but it'll never actually happen without CMS software. Running all the thousands of tasks involved yourself would be literally impossible. Even for a smaller or less interactive site, automation is inevitable.

Automation is freeing up your time to concentrate on what you do best. It is, in this sense, directing your talents, channeling them to where they are best applied -- not minding after mind-numbing minutiae but tending to your talent's best creations, the unique and compelling content only you can provide.

So, who to sign up with, then?

Different "talents"

Well, you don't actually "sign up" for Drupal -- it's just downloaded and installed because it's totally free -- and therein lies the big difference.

With SBI!, someone at Tech Support will stay with you and resolve your problems, even if it takes a thousand-and-one e-mail messages back and forth. Not so with Drupal.

The Drupal community, God bless 'em, are all volunteers. They often rival SBI! representatives in friendly helpfulness, but they simply cannot be expected to help with any and all problems. Indeed, many problems occasion no responses. It can often feel like putting a note in a bottle and casting it off to sea. Even if it's actually found, would the person understand or care? Would the person have the expertise to really help? You get what you pay for.

Another key difference is that Drupal is an ad hoc affair. It is a world without God. No master plan, just a bunch of folks who get together and improvise as they wish. Something doesn't make sense? Yeah, welcome to Drupal. Because there's nothing common about common sense, like how in some cultures family names are listed last while in others they are presented first -- and in still other cultures there's no such thing as a family name. So a function that deals with user permissions and might seem more logically placed under "User Management" is, instead, found only under the settings of the module that makes the function possible, while another function involving only another aspect of user permissions is listed somewhere else entirely.

That's part of what's so confusing about Drupal, several chefs cooking the same broth. It's also, in other cases, what's so great about Drupal: it is the result of collective intelligence, collective talents. "Community plumbing" is its site motto. The fairly chaotic "college campus" ethos is also its greatest strength. You can build anything you want with Drupal, whereas with SBI! you are limited to, well, SBI! -- what it does and how it does it. Drupal is the most open-ended CMS around. There's a basic core around which all kinds of functions may be appended.

A no-brainer?

So it sounds like a choice between having a sexy jet fighter or a nice little car. A no-brainer, right?

Depends on what you know and what you want to do. A fighter pilot looking to fight Commies or space aliens would want a different vehicle than a humble netizen looking to attend a local computing convention. Similarly, Drupal is powerful but just plain weird, while SBI! is fairly limited but not too weird.

Adequate documentation would go a long way towards reducing the "huh?!?!" factor for both CMSes, but again, SBI! comes out slightly ahead for a non-technical newbie webmaster because its documentation actually gets you up and running. Official Drupal documentation, on the other hand...well, isn't. I mean, literally, doesn't exist many times. You just play with things and figure it out. What does exist isn't even truly "official" -- it's just something somebody, anybody, wrote -- and it's documentation in the strictest sense of the word: referential, archival, "white paper." Not a step-by-step how-to, oftentimes, so much as simply a technical what-is. It's hard to document something that has no master plan behind it, after all. Remember, Drupal is a 100% volunteer project -- it is cobbled together by many different people, none of whom are responsible for anything they do. Whereas SBI! is an actual business and they have an incentive for happy customers.

Or, more to the point, SBI! is for real web development newbies while Drupal is best for DIYers with at least a bit of technical understanding already.

The newbie's perspective

Both CMSes will be a chore to learn. SBI! takes rather less time to learn than Drupal, however, and its documentation, scattered and ad hoc as it also is, is much more coherent than Drupal's. (Yes, SBI! documentation is shockingly bad for a paid service; more details at my honest SBI! review.) Drupal documentation SUCKS and there's just no other way of putting it -- saying it's "bad" or "inadequate" or even "sometimes not as helpful as it could be" doesn't begin to capture the antagonism aroused from hours and hours of wading through such "documentation" to little or no (positive) effect. Of course, Drupal is -- you keep reminding yourself -- a volunteer project, and you get what you pay for. But it simply boggles the mind that an otherwise smart person could have put so much work into developing a module only to not have bothered with such basic instructions on its use like simply turning it on and configuring it! (And no, I'm not just talking about common installation and enabling tasks, either.) No kidding: even Yours Truly was responsible for clarifying and perfecting the instructions for the little PageEar module on Drupal.org. Yes, that was fun, to be able to get involved in the community right away, as a complete n00b. Unfortunately, many modules remain without the most basic documentation. With Drupal, expect to spend most of your time just muddling around, forced to beg of strangers' expertise and patience, if you're a non-technical newbie! Honestly, it's just amazing how such amazing things can come without the most fundamental instructions. Imagine being handed the keys to a fighter jet...and that's all you get.

Well, that's just what you get with Drupal -- something really powerful, and the keys to start it up. That's it.

That said, Drupal itself, core and modules, comprise one of the absolute greatest bargains around once you manage to figure things out. Within a month I have a fairly adequate Web 2.0 site up -- and I'm still only beginning to learn how to use Drupal! Anyone with actual computer programming experience will find the infamous Drupal learning curve just a gentle temporary decline in the road towards amazing results.

SBI! is a neat and fairly powerful starter's kit that I heartily recommend to everyone else just starting out with web development and small e-commerce. Drupal is a DIYer's dream-come-true. For newbies, one answers the question Where do you want to go today? while the other involves Where do you want to be tomorrow? Depending on your own skills and interests, it may be that one is all you will ever need.