We decided to reinvent the Hospitality Crew site due to a number of new innovative ideas we want to put into play to really help the industry.

One of these requires a reasonably granular permissions system in the site's infrastructure. The previous site was built on the Joomla CMS system - a big failing here is the rigid user permissions system so we had to make some tough decisions about what to do with the site, moving forward. Being the site's Web Admin, I made the choice to convert the site to the Drupal CMS which looked absolutely brilliant as far as functionality goes.

Lots of stuff to do to get this done, least of which was to understand how the system works Drupal is quite a complicated beast on the surface, believe me. Joomla is great for simple sites with not too much in-depth requirements but when you need to really kick stuff around on a granular basis, Drupal is really the way to go - just be aware of the learning curve.

The conversion of content was pretty easy. Cut and paste kinda stuff with a little massaging here and there. Theming or Templating (in Joomla-speak) was probably the first hurdle I needed to overcome. We initially thought of converting the existing the existing Joomla template over to Drupal and got to the point of contacting a guy I knew who could do the job pretty quickly. We then thought 'Let's actually do something a little fresher and Web 2.0 so our userbase can at least get a good feeling about the site'. With this in mind, I actually designed the current spec. I'm no designer but we're pretty happy with the first attempt - refinements will happen over time, I'm sure.

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