I'm growing more fond of the Drupal content management system and have begun using it in the websites I make for other people. For a tech savvy person, Drupal isn't difficult to get into and manipulate— but not everyone is tech savvy. Whether its friends, family, professors, or a client, there's a good chance that person is not a web developer. If they are, why are you making their website? Learning how to use a CMS and then how to mark up posts can be difficult and time consuming, and end-users either can not, do not have time for, or are not interested in learning how to do it.

One of the features I like in Visual Basic 6 is how easy it is to create an array of "controls", what your average person would call an "interface object" or "widget". By placing a control on the form and then copy-pasting the control into the same form, the IDE would prompt you to create an array for that control.

It's just that simple.

In a database schema it is generally necessary to use a primary key for each relation. These keys often only exist in the database and aren't displayed to the user as they have no contextual meaning. While you may be able to use something that should be unique to each row as a primary key (think social security numbers), I follow the practice of creating an explicit column for each relation as the primary key.

In my spare time over the past few weeks I've been transitioning this website to the Drupal CMS. Though fun and challenging, creating and maintaining my own CMS proved not to be the best route for this and other sites. I think that a good part of the Information Technology world is knowing when to use existing solutions rather than take on the load of all aspects of a project.