Websites, Wordpress, Drupal: How to do it as badly as I do
A quick word on how I build my websites, because my method is:
- Extremely slow,
- Very tedious,
- Not secure at all,
- Impossible to share / scale,
- A huge waste of my life.
If you want to do the same, here's how.
In prehistoric times, I made static HTML / CSS sites. And it was fun. I'd learned HTML during an internship at a web company, and I had a great time making psychedelic sites where everything moved thanks to carefully placed GIFs (these days I say "jghif," to keep both camps happy).
I should have stopped there.
Then I got into Wordpress. And let's be clear: Wordpress is very good. A very mature environment, a solid code base, a very active community around an open-source model, with paid options for those who want them. Whatever your business, in 90% of cases, Wordpress is a good solution.
I should have stopped there.
But when the time came to build a website for my company ChezFilms, I wanted more control. Over the look, the categories, the navigation. I started with a static HTML site: simple, clean, fast. The key info about the company, some showreel films, an email address, and that's it.
And that's where I screwed up. I got sucked in.
I thought: "What if I made just a tiny little database to log my films?" After all, with over 60 films to my name, it made sense to be able to browse the projects by client, by industry, by genre, etc. So I hooked my site up to this database in PHP.
But to fill this database and keep it up to date, I needed an admin console. So I coded that too, still in PHP: a quick way to enter films, crews, and projects, tailored to my needs. Version 1 only handled films. For version 2, I extended it to other types of posts: photos, articles, videos, etc.
And before I knew it, I had coded a new Wordpress.
A much, much, much worse one, obviously. But – I have to admit – very well suited to my needs. So if you go to ChezFilms, it's still my code running the site. (Update: no, that's no longer the case!) The console also handles invoices and quotes.
Then... I got fed up. Since the beginning of the year, as you know, I've been focusing more on the content than on the container.
So I started over from scratch with Drupal.
It's a framework that lets you build a site from A to Z, but in more depth than Wordpress. The architecture is extremely modular, so you can do whatever you want with a minimum of code. And there are ready-made templates. That's what I used to build this version of the Boulengerie, and what I'll use to build the next version of ChezFilms.
And after that, I promise: we'll stop there.