Cruncht maintains the topicmap.com website which is a portal and blog for all things concerned with topic maps. It has been running for 10 years now and has traced the development of the topic maps community.

Over that time it has been through a number of iterations in its platform. It started out as a simple, static HTML site, then it moved to the Blogger hosted service, then to WordPress and now finally to Drupal. At each stage it became easier to manage and more functional.

The move to WordPress was a vast improvement over what was possible before. WordPress offers a lot of readily available functionality from the get go, providing a complete product which makes blogging and simple sites a breeze. WordPress also has a very healthy theming community which means that there is a wide variety of designs available to websites. However, there are some limitations if your requirements extend beyond what is required for simpler sites.

topicmap.com had a number of requirements which didn’t map so well to the WordPress way of doing things:

• a variety of content types
• relationships which extend beyond categorization
• filtering content by facets
• exposure to the semantic web.

All of these new requirements were possible with Drupal so the switch was made. I wouldn’t say that the move was easy. Drupal requires quite a bit more setup than WordPress, however, the effort is worth it for the flexibility you gain.

Enjoy the new topicmap.com website.