Sorry for the lack of posts of late, but among other things, I have been looking into software that would allow me to build a community type website.

As I’ve told a few of you by e-mail already, the software that has really caught my eye is Drupal which describes itself as “an open source content management platform”.

I don’t often tell friends and acquaintances much about what I do because I know it bores (most of) them and I made the mistake of telling one yesterday that I was looking at a content management system called Drupal.

His eyes glazed over before I’d finished the sentence.

“Content managing what?” he asked.

That’s the problem with a lot of what you come across on the internet. It baffles non-techies (like me) with buzz words and phrases and acronyms that leave you running for the exit.

A content management system however does exactly what it says on the tin. It is a system (or platform in Drupal’s case) that manages the content you want to appear on a website. Instead of you painstakingly creating each and every page, you feed in the content and it files it, sorts it and manages it.

It’s a bit like a car too. You can sit in it and drive along without understanding exactly what’s going on under the bonnet.

Drupal has a bit of a learning curve - partly because it likes to use funky terminology like nodes and vocabularies (yes, my eyes glazed over too first time around), but once you jump in feet first, the power and simplicity of the thing soon dispels any inhibitions you might have.

It’s free, open source and has dozens upon dozens of add-ons (called modules) that make it a beast with incredible potential.

For my community style website I wanted every member to be able to have a blog. Drupal does that straight out of the box.

And I wanted a forum. Drupal has that too. A really clean simple forum and I’ll be interested to see how it fairs because I usually use phpBB or Simple Machines Forum.

I also wanted to include some form of member to member messaging and live chat and thanks to modules, Drupal does that too.

You can see how I’m getting on with it over at my new community site for Internet Entrepreneurs.

It’s still at the bare bones stages, but I’m getting there. In fact if you are an internet entrepreneur yourself - or there’s one inside you struggling to get out - you would be doing me a big favour if you joined and started using the site so I can see how it performs.

Any feedback - good, bad or indifferent - would be appreciated too