One Creation Problem or Another

I have been conversing lately with creatives who have been describing their struggles. I find my own struggles echoing in these conversations. Some of us seem to be hindered in our creativity to the point of developing something like procrastination. Our websites don’t get finished or they suffer from lack of attention and updating. Others of us, and I include myself largely in this category, are so enthusiastic about the beginning of the creative process that we start too many things simultaneously. Not surprisingly, our websites appear in the same state as those facing hindrances to their creative process. On the one hand, paucity of inspiration stalls our projects; on the other, abundance of creative flow sidetracks our projects.

I am currently exploring the latest release of Drupal. I have at least two clients whose projects really call for an installation of a Content Management System or Framework. I have recently had much success with Wordpress, but others have warned me about some of its limitations. Drupal, they say, is the solution to these limitations; and they seem to be correct. Yet, for the end-user, I have yet to see anything that comes close to Wordpress. As I was describing to a colleague on Twitter earlier today, hand-coding sites is too time consuming for many projects, though the control and stability it offers in design is unparalleled. As I explored more about Drupal 6 today, I discovered a Ruby-based CMS called Radiant. The promise of such an application is exciting, but its current iteration leaves a lot of code hanging out of the core so it is not yet very user-centered. I intend to keep my eye on this development though.