Although I continue down the path of becoming a Rails developer (I’m going to Railsconf next week, in fact…) it looks like I’m going to spend a few days exploring the ever-popular PHP. I’ve been invited to attend a free online Drupal seminar and I can’t resist spending a few hours learning about yet another Web-publishing technology.

Just paging through the docs for Drupal brings back memories of the late, great Arsdigita Community System that I worked with back in the boom days. Every aspect of the Web stack is slightly different - Arsdigita used to use Solaris, AOLserver, Oracle, and Tcl instead of Linux, Apache, Mysql/Postgresql, and PHP - but all the same components are there, and I sense that the architecture is going to feel familiar. There are only so many ways of solving the content-management problem, after all.

Amusingly, just as I’m invited to learn a PHP-based open-source tool I find myself reading a blog post advocating PHP.