Hi! I have an idea for a project that would partly involve a community-like website. I know roughly what I want, the question is just how to do it as easily as possible.
What the website needs:
- Swedish language (I'm prepared to translate things myself if it's needed, but it must have good support for Swedish characters such as å ä ö)
- A regular CMS for managing the website, including news articles (essentially a blog) and articles of more static nature (such as FAQ's etc)
- A good, clean, fast and easy-to-use forum that doesn't feel bloated (a good example of what I want would be Vanilla)
- The ability for users to start their own "teams". Each team automatically gets its own private/hidden forum section as well as a public group blog. A user must not be part of more than one team at the same time. Anyone can apply to be part of any team, but the initiator of each team decides who is allowed and who is not. There must be a maximum limit of say 15 members in each team. At a glance, "organic groups" seems to be a pretty good solution for this?
- A public gallery with support for at least images, text and movies (streaming, preferably a flash application). Every uploaded submission must be manually approved by a moderator before it appears on the website. Support for rating, comments, sorting, albums etc would be welcome but not absolutely necessary.
- A natural connection between news articles and the forum, similar to how you can discuss blog articles, but in the forum instead. So, when a news article is published, it automatically creates a new discussion in the forum. Another variant would be to have a certain forum section in which only some people are allowed to post, and where a new post automatically shows up as an article on the news site.
- Super easy sign up but still good spam protection (I'm okay with captchas)
- Not too difficult for me to customize visually the way I want (more than CSS)
- (Not necessary but wanted) Google maps integration, with icons showing how the members of each team are spread out over the country (I could probably make this myself if there ain't a ready solution)
- (Not necessary but wanted) RSS feed
Yeah I think that's about it, once I have that I have a good foundation for my project. I've been looking at different ready made open source projects that could solve this (Vanilla as mentioned, integrated with WordPress is one option I've been looking at). However, I think that I would be best off using a full scale solution like Drupal. So, I have two questions.
Questions:
- Can Drupal do this? I would assume yes.
- Can I do this with Drupal? If you would do an estimation, how much of this could be done with "plug-and-play" modules (adapted if needed) and how much of it would I need to develop from scratch? What skills would it take? I'm very competent in (x)html, javascript, css and general webdesign, I don't know that much about server side technology though, trivial knowledge in php, but I'm definitely ready to learn.
I have no budget, I do this alone, but the website doesn't have to be done till early spring 2008 (that's eight or nine months from now at least). Is it realistic for me to do this alone?
Any other things coming to mind when you read this? Any kind of feedback would be welcome. Thanks! :)
Comments
1 - Yes 2 - Yes. Everything
1 - Yes
2 - Yes. Everything but the auto-discussion-topic-creation is provided by existing modules. I'd estimate a couple of days to get familiarized with Drupal terminology, a few weeks for evaluating discussion forum and media gallery options, and a couple of weeks to cleanup? (Assuming, you know exactly what you want, in terms of functionality as well as roles and user acccess.)
Why all the red tape?
Would it be unrealistic to expect Drupal to allow me to produce a large university website in two weeks? Considering all the stuff you just suggested to do, development time goes through the rough. Does Drupal really get in the way that MUCH? Please explain to me why I shouldn't go with ExpressionEngine or Wordpress or even a web framework like CakePHP or Ruby on Rails (and/or their respective CMS').
Assumptions
I assumed the OP's project was part-time/nights and weekends. Drupal has lots of contributed modules, and if you're looking for specific UI/functionality it takes time to evaluate them. If you're a quick learner, with clear specs and lots of time, then you can set your own aggressive schedule.
Yes
Drupal can do all of this. Check out Organic Groups, the Zen theme (there is lots of documentation on how to make changes to it), image module, and gmap module.
This shouldn't take too long to build as these modules do most of what you want out of the box.
--
Matt
http://www.mattfarina.com
...Drupal can do all of
With a few blood and tears.