I hope no one bookmarked that Wordpress site I've been playing with as an expansion of my Public Library links.

Wordpress is good, but it's just not hitting the spot for me. So, onward…

The next experiment is with Drupal. I avoided it, even though it was one of the first packages I was seriously impressed with, because it doesn't have a learning curve it has a learning cliff. Not to mention that drupal.org misbehaves pretty badly in IE, which you will see for yourself if you check out this link to an announcement of the availability of two Drupal packages that are preconfigured sanely.

From Cyberdash, the home of said packages:

One of the biggest complaints about Drupal is that it's difficult to configure. I'll agree. As I've said in this discussion thread on drupal.org, most Drupal users know "that the reason that Drupal is difficult to customize is that it's like a block of clay--has to be molded for the particular site configuration." And I firmly believe, despite some of the comments in the same thread, that this is the number one obstacle stopping many people from adopting it.

Well, I'll admit. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to take the Linux kernel, assemble the necessary packages, and configure everything. That's what Linux distributions are for.

So in the interest of making Drupal easier for newbies, I've assembled two Drupal distributions:

DrupalEd is intended for the writing classroom. I say that not because it can't be used for other classes, but writing teachers are generally more interested, I believe, in discourse and community interaction more so than content delivery. And in this area Drupal excels. Looking for testing and grading modules? They won't be here. It's simply the configuration that Terra and I have been using for a few semesters now.
DrupalBlog is setup as in individual blogsite, much like what Terra, Clancy and I use. By modifying a couple of permission settings, it can easily be configured to allow for multiple authors like Kairosnews.

And the demos for the packages (DrupalBlog for typical weblogs and DrupalEd prove that Drupal can play quite nicely with IE. Nice selection of skins, too.