Starting the ocPortal journey

I became frustrated with Drupal. Bought many of the books and such; never became a Drupal fanboy. The migration from Drupal 6 to 7 failed badly and the Drush upgrade path for even the most recent v6 security releases won't work. Ugh.

Just wanted a CMS that wouldn't provide any dead-ends. When I first started the website for my townhome association, I compared a LOT of opensource CMS's. Spent hours comparing all the features.

Drupal has a huge learning curve but that's reality; nothing is truly free.

I came close to grabbing one of the hot PHP MVC frameworks, but just don't trust myself to write production quality PHP code for any nontrivial sites.

After reviewing the latest CMS's after recently, I checked see which SimpleScript packages were available. I had heard of ocPortal in my CMS research but it did not stick. This time, ocPortal showed up as 'new' so I gave it a shot.

I did not use the SimpleScript installer; don't want to mess up stuff on my hoster where the production Drupal site is still running. Instead, I downloaded and installed under XAMPP running on Windows. I've done this with a lot of CMS's…trust me.

Worked fine. Ran slowly, but I think that's because I've got a lot of PHP and Apache debug stuff enabled.

Today, I ran the Bitnami installer on another machine. Neat; that worked well, and ran faster.

My goal is to get the townhome association website up and running. I'm excited about the built-ins in ocPortal. I must have a decent event calendar for example.

There is not much content to migrate. Also looking forward to the use of the WYSIWYG editor, image uploading, and galleries. Looks like ocPortal is truly "batteries included."

Wish me luck!

Dwight Fellman
Minnesota, USA

No sooner asked for, than granted.

Good Luck!

 

Welcome aboard Dwight!

Wishing you a rewarding journey of discovery!

Hi fellmad,
I also I became frustrated with Drupal and I didn't put in as much as you did
ocPortal for me has been the best one yet
Welcome!

Dwight, you won't need anything as nebulous as luck here. It is a good stable and well designed platform which all seems to work like a clock, maybe not quite but it is trustworthy. I'll say welcome aboard and good choice!

Good Luck! I hope to hear weekly (or whatever term of time you find suitable) reports on your progress.

We are beginning our journey together. So far I am still doing lots of reading although I have local install that I poke and prod at from time to time. Lurning curves are frustrating sometimes but so far I finding most of the documentation I need. Some bits cold probably be clearer but then I keep reading on with confidence that whats a little muddled now will probably make more sense later. Again good luck!

Welcome Dwight!


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