At the core of PLCDev.com is a content management system (CMS) called Drupal. I think it's fantastic. I remember the old days (circa 1997) where all the html pages were static and I did an inordinate amount of 'hard coding' and copy/paste. I then discovered how to make them 'dynamic' by using the PHP scripting language when I had to make a contact management system. There still was a lot of work to do though and worries about security.

So when I began considering new projects (like my baseball site) I went shopping for a content management system to make my life easier. After much research and trying out demos (opensourcecms.com is great for taking test drives) it came down to Mambo* and Drupal. At the time Drupal wasn't PHP5 compliant which scared me away so I went with Mambo. While Mambo is great there were two things that turned me off:

1. The user documentation was slim or at least I had a hard time digging out some of the dirt on making modifications and how things work in the back end. I'm a pretty persistent bugger when it comes to things like this so don't take this lightly. Drupal has a lot of documentation and a great API.
2. The killer was that clean URLs are not free (you pay $50). Clean URLs make the web address simple for search engines to recognize. Drupal has it built in and makes it real easy. You can call me cheap but if you can get something for free then, hey, why not?

By the time I got fed up with Mambo I took another look at Drupal which was now PHP5 compliant and on the verge of a new version 4.6. I haven't regretting jumping ship. Now Drupal has a bit of a steep learning curve but as I've usually found that once you've reached the plateau of learning you have a lot of flexibility and freedom. It's worth the climb. Out of all the features the clean urls, taxonomy and module/theme implementations really stand out. So now you know about Drupal and every once in awhile I'll post my adventures in CMS land.

(*Note: The original Mambo developer's have split off and formed Joomla)

Update:  After my switch, a team of programmers developed a URL friendly solution for Mambo but ironically have since converted to Drupal --> Why Xaneon Switched from Mambo to Drupal.