The FCL Lab website currently tops our list of priorities.<\/p>\n
We’ve been struggling with it for months now, and our biggest obstacles have been the odd affordances and constraints of Drupal<\/a>. \u00a0Drupal is the content management system used by Oregon State University. \u00a0It’s open-source and very adaptable.<\/p>\n These are good things.<\/p>\n It’s also user-hostile and often intolerably restrictive for users without certain administrative privileges.<\/p>\n These are bad things.<\/p>\n Very bad things.<\/p>\n It’s sort of like being handed an array of organic compounds and told to create a rhinoceros. Of course, you have to assemble your rhinoceros one cell at a time, creating each cell individually, organelle by organelle.\u00a0 You can’t just make a skin cell, copy it, then paste it all over the rhino.\u00a0 You see, this lack of a basic function allows you to make a rhino with all kinds of crazy skin, so it’s actually a “feature.” Aren’t you grateful?<\/p>\n Oh, and you can’t bond hydrogen to carbon yourself because your version of nature does not include that functionality. \u00a0There’s an active community of creator deities out there who have found various workarounds, but these all require a level of sanctioned omnipotence that the universe has withheld from you as a matter of policy.\u00a0 You can finish at least the brain by the end of the week, right?\u00a0 After all, it’s just one thing!<\/p>\n Perhaps Drupal’s most beautiful moment so far came toward the beginning of our development process. \u00a0We wanted to find out how to activate and work with modules, so we tried to consult the help documentation. \u00a0Instead of the help page, we were greeted with a message telling us to install the “help” module, with no further explanation.<\/p>\n Fantastic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The FCL Lab website currently tops our list of priorities. We’ve been struggling with it for months now, and our biggest obstacles have been the odd affordances and constraints of Drupal. \u00a0Drupal is the content management system used by Oregon State University. \u00a0It’s open-source and very adaptable. These are good things. It’s also user-hostile and… Continue reading