About the Creation Articles

Articles related to website building are collected under Creation.

Bigining.

Creation.

"Creation" carries the meaning of bringing something into being — imagination, making, building. As a label for a menu item, "Web production" or "Website creation" would be the natural translation, but those are too long to work well. So I chose "Creation" on its own, and use it to gather all articles related to website building.

The articles in the Creation category follow my process of building a website with Drupal — from setting up a MacBook environment to configuring a hosting service, anything connected to website construction finds its place here.

1-1. From WordPress to Drupal.

This website runs on Drupal. Before Drupal, I built websites with WordPress — and I still use WordPress on another site, with the same genuine affection I have for Drupal.

What follows is a rough summary of my own impressions of WordPress and Drupal. My knowledge has its limits, so some of this may be off the mark — apologies in advance.

1-2. WordPress.

Both are CMSes, but WordPress comes with a remarkably polished interface and design. Depending on the theme and plugins you choose, the functionality is easy to understand and the end result is easy to visualize — so even a first-time user can build a well-designed website using little more than what's already provided.

The design themes are stylish, and the combination of ease of use and strong design is why WordPress has by far the largest user base of any CMS. Because so many people use it, tutorials and how-to guides are widely available. On the infrastructure side, hosting providers have adopted it aggressively, and the environment for getting a WordPress site live — even for a complete beginner — is well established.

1-3. Drupal.

Drupal has an interface that holds its own against WordPress, but out of the box, the settings for its many features are kept to a minimum. After installation, you need to think through the site structure to some degree before you start, and configure the settings each part of the build requires. For that reason, it can feel a little hard to get your bearings at first.

Once the structure and settings are in reasonable shape and you start to understand how the features work, you find that the configurations you've built can be reused in multiple places — and refined further at each point of reuse. The result is a high degree of flexibility in how you build the site, and once you're comfortable with it, Drupal is easier to work with than WordPress.

Drupal is not designed with individual beginners in mind. Tutorials and how-to guides are far fewer than they are for WordPress. On the infrastructure side, hosting providers have not adopted it nearly as widely, and you need a certain level of knowledge and willingness to learn before you can get a site up without relying entirely on your host.

1-4. CMS.

Both WordPress and Drupal are CMSes. They both run on PHP and a database, and both provide a dedicated GUI-based admin panel that lets you build and publish a website without writing code.

In both Drupal and WordPress, site design is handled through what are called themes. Feature extensions are called plugins in WordPress and modules in Drupal. By combining a theme you like with the modules or plugins you need, you can build the website you're after.

For example, you might start with a basic blog and then add a lightweight social feature or a photo gallery — and through those extensions, reshape the whole thing into a photo gallery site with posting capabilities.

1-5. WordPress Themes and Plugins.

WordPress themes and plugins are published in enormous numbers, both paid and free. Well-known ones are often packaged to work straight out of the box, and because individual users make up a large part of the audience, a familiar model has emerged: a free version with limited features, and a paid version that unlocks everything — much like mobile apps.

The WordPress theme and plugin market is substantial, and the well-known offerings are developed at a company level rather than by individuals — which shows in the feature depth and polish. Installing them is straightforward through the GUI in the admin panel, and that polished interface is one of WordPress's clear strengths.

1-6. Drupal Themes and Modules.

Drupal also has an extensive range of themes and modules, paid and free alike. The difference from WordPress is that many of them feel oriented toward enterprise and developer use rather than individual users — and single-function modules are far more common. The typical pattern is to configure things yourself and combine several modules to arrive at the feature or design you're after.

The economics of the Drupal ecosystem reflect this. WordPress has a functioning market for apps that individual users can buy, while Drupal's user base skews corporate, and the revenue models tend toward cloud services and large-scale enterprise development. That means there's less individual demand, and as a result, polished packaged themes and modules are fewer.

Single-function modules require the user to configure them, and are used at the user's own responsibility — which is why almost all of them are free. In exchange, the freedom to build exactly what you want is high, and in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, Drupal produces sophisticated, polished sites. While packaged themes and modules are rare, Drupal does offer what are called distributions — highly capable, feature-rich bundles, though there are only a handful.

Some themes and modules can be installed through the GUI, but the basic approach is the command line. For those familiar with it, that's the fastest and most reliable method — but for anyone without a development background, the command line itself can feel like a barrier.

Many tasks also require logging into the server from a terminal via SSH. The key-based authentication setup alone can be a steep hill for a beginner.

1-7. Using Drupal Takes a Willingness to Learn.

With WordPress, you can build a website of genuine quality without much background knowledge — packaged environments are ready to go, and in many cases the hosting infrastructure is bundled in. That low barrier means beginners can reach something close to what they had in mind without hitting a wall.

As you get comfortable with WordPress, you start adding features, changing designs, pushing the system further. And it's not just beginners and individuals — large commercial websites run on it too. It genuinely scales from small personal sites to substantial operations, which is what makes it such a capable CMS.

Installing Drupal and getting it running is not especially difficult. But building a website in the shape you actually want requires understanding what modules are available, how to configure them, where settings live, how to write those settings, and what the terminology means — in short, a solid grasp of how the system is structured and what the rules are. Without that, you may hit a wall before the site takes form.

That understanding of structure and rules builds gradually, through repeated use of the admin GUI. Because you're doing the configuration yourself, you eventually find that detailed settings become second nature — and when that happens, the freedom Drupal offers starts to feel real. That's the point at which you can actually build the site you had in mind.

What follows are the version details for the Drupal Core, Theme, and Modules I currently use.

1.  Drupal Core

2. Theme

3. Modules

These are the modules I have installed. My choices cover: a module for adding meta tags that Drupal doesn't configure by default, one for customizing breadcrumb placement, modules for reCAPTCHA on the contact form, and a module for using an external SMTP service.

AWS is Amazon's cloud service, well known in the industry. The infrastructure is divided by function — web server, caching, database, and more — with each handled by a dedicated server built for that specific purpose. The result is a service that can scale to handle enormous traffic without going down. It's an impressive offering, but for someone running a personal blog, it's more than you need — and the costs add up quickly.

2-1. A VPS That's Worth the Price.

If you're running a personal site on Lightsail and traffic grows to the point where you need more capacity, migrating to AWS's more powerful, specialized resources is not a particularly difficult step — and from there you gain access to the full scalability and flexibility that AWS is known for.

It may sound like an overstatement, but there's something in using AWS that lets even an individual in Japan go through the same process that tech companies around the world follow — start small, move fast, and grow. That's another reason I find AWS worth using.

2-2. Bitnami package for Drupal.

For now I'm running the Bitnami Drupal setup. If it continues to work without issues, I'll stick with it. I haven't fully mapped out what's possible with Lightsail yet, so verifying OS and PHP updates is something I plan to work through over time.

That was a quick run through Drupal and Amazon Lightsail, the hosting service I use on this site. From the next article on, I move into preparation for working with Drupal — setting up a local environment so I can run Drupal on my own machine.