By zelaznog on

Hi,

I've developed community sites using Joomla and Community Builder. Can Drupal do the same type of functionality as Community Builder i.e. membership registration, private messagings, forums, blogs, photo/video upload, etc...

As for coding and customization, what type of programming skill level do I need to be... I'm mainly a front-end designer with not much backend experience. Will it be easy for me to get a site up and running using Drupal?

thanks,

Zal

Comments

BioALIEN’s picture

BioALIEN commented

"membership registration, private messagings, forums, blogs, photo/video upload"

Drupal can already do almost all of what you've mentioned. It's important to state that not directly out of the box as some will require modules. Also I am not 100% sure if there is a private messaging module, Drupal tend to enable users to email each other rather than PM.

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BioALIEN
Buy/Sell/Trade with other webmasters: WebMasterTrader.com

Budrick’s picture

Budrick commented

Explore Drupal modules

Just at first glance you can use:
Privatemsg
Organic Groups
core forums or 3rd party forums integration
core blogs module
Acidfree, Gallery2 integration, Video.
The other very powerful and useful modules for general use are Views and Panels.

Problems your can meet:
No out of the box image upload and insertion - for that you should choose from TinyMCE, FCKEditor, IMCE, Image+ImgAssist, Gallery2 etc...
Too much code in themes (templates) comparing to Joomla.

Drupal takes more effort to learn but is more flexible and clearly designed.

Ive moved from Joomla to Drupal, it took some time but now I am just happy with it.

slinky’s picture

slinky commented

Interesting to see a Joomla user here. I am also one of those and have been for a while. It's a very good piece of software for many things and has a lot of modules going for it. I've even seen some great community modules like Community Builder and the other add-ons that have been developed for a very active community. But Joomla's strength is that there are many things a user can do (many plug-in modules) but community is not its strongest usage.

What made me come here was that I've seen a few great examples of social community/news/resources sites that were made with drupal. I'm more of a hacker with some knowledge of php and mysql and have put together some decent sites but will need help (such as paying someone with a specialth in building sites) to create something that resembles the great work I've seen here, e.g. teamsugar, projectopus, gimme20, mothersclick, etc.) My impressions here of drupal are as follows and wonder if it is for me:

Pro:
* incredibly well organized site and resources - kudos, much better than i've ever seen
* appearance of sites no longer always the boxy "yes it's drupal" look
* Good SEO, larger community, reasonable number of add-ons

Con
* Still seems that serious effort is needed for non-box/standard theme creation
* Some sites really shine but make me wonder how much custom work is under the hood
* While always a learning curve, seems there is a noticeably larger one here
* Perhaps smaller community/availability of items than Joomla

I'm curious to know why you switched, what your experiences were, etc. In the meanwhile, I'm shopping for what it will cost me to get a reasonably good social community site up and running in drupal with some design work. No, phpfox does not see to be the answer. :)

barnish’s picture

barnish commented

I did a bunch of investigation for a social networking site with exact same type of needs and ended up with Drupal versus the ones above.

Plone looked great but requires the 'resource hungry' Zope so a lot of the big ISPs wont host it. Very technical to use.

Joomla really annoys me at this stage. Its a dreamhost one click install... which may be driving popularity? Im semi technical but the interface inside is a nightmare. I tried installing the beta but had the same problems .... Really can't understand why its so popular.

Daisy is a combination wiki/cms that looked interesting but very early days. Too early to do something serious?

I really liked the whole way that Drupal works for the 'cant do php but can install anything' type person. Definitely has a learning curve tho - its not a wordpress for example in terms of ease of install.

Also saw a lot of evaluation that listed the following advantages ...

1) Overall Performance
2) Efficient and cleaner code
3) Extensible and Robust Framework
4) Granular Access Control
5) Versioning
6) Taxonomy
7) Scalability

With the following disadvantage

Security ...?

Anyone agree or disagree with this list?

ALso, have you also ever tried used cmsmatrix.org to compare?

slinky’s picture

slinky commented

I think you made a mistake by installed the Joomla 1.5 beta, which is still a distant goal. The current version is very usable and what it excels at is rapid site development without a multitiude of programming needed. I personally couldn't evaluate just how good or bad the code of Joomla is although I can read it and perform simple php and mysql hacks. It's reasonably well laid out although I'm not crazy about the default pagination system, which you can get through using the SEO addons.

Another major pro of Joomla is that there are literally hundreds of extensions and other developers who are active on the forums. If you have a problem, need a tweak, have to find a solution there are numerous people there to help you solve the problem.

Regarding drupal, it seems like it may be a good development platform but it's only for serious developers. The good sites that I've seen so far are mostly those from organizations with money for development. You can put together an interesting, hot looking Joomla site for under $200 - easily. Add in another $200 and you've got an interesting and more compelling set of modules and add-ons that fill out the feature set.

Unless I'm missing something, the point is to get your site up as quickly as possible and make it look and function as well as possible and easy for the user to understand. If you're on a budget, Joomla is clearly the way to go. Just my two cents and very open to hearing other opinions, which is why I'm here.

gusaus’s picture

gusaus commented

This Drupal group may be of interest:
http://groups.drupal.org/social-networking-sites

Gus Austin
Director of Chaos and Confusion
PepperAlley Productions
What am I trying to do with Drupal?

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Gus Austin

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

What an interesting perspective.

I have used Drupal successfully for 3 years and only recently had to learn some php. Specifically, I had to learn how to use an if else statement. There are thousands of sites by hobbyists and power users to supplement the existence of the higher profile 'pro' sites. My sister in law needed a site, Drupal worked for her. She wanted a gallery, I downloaded image module. She wanted a newsletter, I downloaded simplenews. She has recently asked me about a wishlist for customers, so I am turning on user logon and checking out the wishlist module. Some day I suppose I should learn php, in the meantime, I shall just have to limp along.

Does Drupal have a learning curve? Yes. But so does Joomla. You have learned through experience what modules and extensions you have to pay for to get a viable site in Joomla. That's why you can say it easy for you. If someone has support questions about Joomla, I suspect the Joomla support forums would be a better place for accurate support information that the Drupal forums :)

http://www.blkmtn.org/Good-reading-for-those-starting-out-with-Drupal

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

slinky’s picture

slinky commented

Gus and Steven -

Thank you for your reference and comments. I didn't say that Drupal can't be used to create a site that functions for a purpose intended. It can but it takes much more time and work than does Joomla. If you want something up quickly, looks good, has lots of different features and add-ons with an excellent forum and support, Joomla is unquestionably king, IMHO.

Yes, there are issues with Joomla if you want to do more with your layout. But as I learned a bit the hard way, buying professional templates and modifying them slightly to fit your needs is an excellent way to go and there are tons of Joomla resources. It's a fantastic piece of software for rapid site development and minimal mucking around in PHP.

So why am I here? Well, because I realize that it has its current limits and there are some items that have become more important to me. The ease of plugin of these social community type sites, which Joomla's community builder is an excellent new tool but it requires some backend cleanup to get it usable and looking good. There is the issue of permalinks which is most important. The taxonomy issue of only 3 levels of content isn't horrific (after all, how much digging will your users deal with?) However, there are limitations in that regard.

If there are any Drupal developers or people who have a social community site up and running that I could use/buy as a skeleton, I'd be greatly appreciative and could also learn as I go. Right now I'm looking at finding a list of the best modules to accomplish this, which would also optimally include a file repository, rating system for reviews, business directory, classifieds, picture gallery. Thanks to Gus I'm on my way to a better resource.

Thank you both. Mike

PS - I like the forum system (simpleforums, vb, phpbb, etc.) much more than this one, the style which I have always found an extra chore to navigate.