Photo by bre pettis

Over the holiday break, I learned the hard way that you need a power drill to put up wainscoting.

My fiancée and I spent the better part of a day hammering in nails into some paneling we were putting up in my mother-in-law's dining room without drilling any starter holes first. The project was a complete mess, until we got our hands on a power drill. After that, we finished placing the paneling in about the same time it took us to put up 2 panels. Before we had the right tools in our hands, the entire project was a frustrating mess.

Putting together web sites can be a messy affair as well, especially when you're trying to force code to do something it simply wasn't designed to do. With the work that I do at TFnS, I try to use some of the best tools that I have available to deliver quality products to my clients. Here are some of the tools that I have used to my advantage.

CMS (General) - Drupal

Drupal is a great CMS that's flexible enough to handle just about any situation. The philosophy of Drupal of
creating generalized solutions rather than specialized ones has really been it's strongest point.

The biggest fault that I can find with Drupal is that due to its commitment to being as flexible as possible, site administration can be a bit of a challenge, but this is definitely correctable by a talented developer.

Other Options: Joomla

CMS (Blog) - Wordpress

Wordpress is the quintessential blogging software that makes blogging super-easy. They recently came off of a fairly major update, which has made administration of the software much easier for clients who don't have the technical skills/patience to handle maintenance. Combine that with the vasts amount of custom themes and modules floating out there, it makes for a very impressive package. Unless your server doesn't support PHP or MySQL, there really isn't any good reason not to use Wordpress as your blogging software.

Other Options: Movable Type, Serendipity

Framework (Server-side) - CakePHP

CakePHP is a great option for web sites that don't quite fit the mold of what standard CMS's offer, or if there is going to be a high level of customization. CakePHP acts as a set of reusable modules that handle the basic things that should be handled by the CMS (clean URLs, administration section, basic security, etc) without the developer having to rewrite these things over and over again.

Other Options: Django

Framework (Javascript) jQuery

jQuery is a Javascript framework that makes doing awesome Javascript effects much easier. The base jQuery library is rock solid, and their officially supported UI plugin is slowly but surely improving. There is a decently sized developer community to support extra customization.

Other Options: MooTools

Framework (CSS) - Blueprint

Although I've been aware of Blueprint for about a year, I haven't tried using it until I saw the work that Mark Bolton Designs did with it for the upcoming Drupal redesign. Blueprint is extremely flexible, and has lots of great default settings for type.

Other Options: 960 Grid System