Drupal after a Month

Now that I've been using Drupal for a month (Drupal is driving this site), I thought it would be a good time to write up my impressions of this open source CMS. Obviously this is before I know the tool in depth, and also before I become jaded or a zealot. For reference, over the past seven years I've worked with a couple custom CMS systems, both driving very large and small web sites, and I also have used Wordpress (not a CMS) for two other personal blogs. Also, my emphasis using Drupal for this site has been as a blog so I haven't fully explored all the CMS features. I really like Drupal for many reasons including:

• Very easy to add features to a site. You download a module, set some parameters, and then you have a new feature (instructions). Examples of useful features that I've added easily to this site: feedburner redirects (Feedburner module), CAPTCHA checking for form submission to block robots (CAPTCHA module), email forwarding posts (Forward module), SEO and human-friendly urls (pathauto module), links to digg and other services (Service Links module), and full name listing as author for blog posts (Authorship module). That's not counting the really useful core modules that I've enabled for the site like the ability to pull in / aggregate other feeds (Aggregator module), comments (Comments module), automatically pinging services such as Technorati (Ping module), search (Search module), some web access statistics (Statistics module), the ability to create different taxonomies/categorizations (Taxonomy module), and the ability to automatically have features of the site turned off under high load (Throttle module).
• Built-in performance and throttling. You can set how aggressively you cache, and selectively set which features get turned off under higher load.
• Upcoming features. Since Drupal has gained some momentum, one feels the inevitability of new features being added as time goes on. Also, since it looks to be easy to add new modules, you could add a module yourself if you wanted.
• Nice modularization. I haven't read the documentation on how to develop modules, but, just seeing how modules work when installing them, the pluggability of modules seems very nice. Once installed/enabled, modules aren't just stovepipes. For example, when in admin mode the CAPTCHA module shows a message next to every form on your site asking if you want CAPTCHA there. Also, it appears that modules can easily write to the log screen, and are all controlled from the same core administration screen. When writing a post, the different options are embedded right on one page (for instance, the pathauto module automatically indicates, and lets you override, the alias it plans on giving your post).
• Flexible themes. I'm using the Garland theme, and I liked how you can set your own colors and other things are parameterized like your logo.
• Multiple taxonomies. You can create easily create your own category lists.

Perhaps above everything else, it just seems that the details have been done very nicely in Drupal. Overall a site in Drupal appears to be easy to administer. These are some items that weren't as smooth: a) didn't get the Backup module to work quickly enough (was faster just to use scripts to do it rather than get the module to work), b) still don't fully understand the file upload/download environment (especially for counting the downloads), c) by default you're in raw html editing (yes, you can install a web-based HTML editor, but the ones I tried so far don't seem very useful), and d) getting the transparent logo needed for the Garland theme working quickly. A note to people currently working in a large, complex enterprise content management environment: I highly recommend playing with Drupal to get the creative juices flowing and also to work in a less constrained environment. Also, it's nice to work from a clean slate on a new site (although I've already bumped into a place where I wish I had set up the site differently in the first place). But of course working in an enterprise environment has a host of other requirements that have to be dealt with (for example standardized look across sites, security, single sign on, integration with internal repositories, existing systems, and standardized administration).