Progress
I've spent most of the day learning the technical underpinnings of Drupal. I gave myself a project, to create a plug-in that renders the weekly archive sidebar box. What I came up lets you choose between weekly and monthly links, or both (for completeness) and will generate the archive pages as well.
I have to admit, I'm finding PHP to be an amusing language.
The Live Discussion Threads box is next, and now that I'm familiar with what must be done it will be a quick job.
My real concern was the "Convert Line Breaks" filter in Drupal is pretty weak and templating is no joke. Drupal, Wordpress and ExpressionEngine all require you to be comfortable with PHP to really get creative. In looking for a lazy way out I found James Seng's project. James is way out in front of me, having handled the line break issue, and modified the comments module to handle comments from unregistered users (which was the next major project) and a number of other changes that. And he's come up with a lighter-weight templating system, which I've yet to look at. He modified the distribution files while I'm writing plug-ins, but since I'm at the beginning of this leg of the journey I'll have a lot less work if I build on what he's done.
