By quarky on

Hi,

reading the doco I think Drupal may just be what I am looking for, but to be certain I would like to ask whether it can be used to make a site like this:

- the site has news divided in sections, no comments needed. The news is automatically archived after a certain date and is from then on only accesible in the 'archive' section.
- the site needs something like 'send this link to a friend'.
- the site needs newsletter functionality. The mailings should actually contain a html page that is created in the backend and consists of choosen news topics. What I mean is, an administrator should be able to mark a news story to be included in the mailing.
- visitors can register themselves and add information about the music band they are playing in. This info however, should not be published until an administrator has approved the info.
- when visiting the site, the first page has a separate template with headlines and stuff. After clicking a newstopic or 'read more' or something, the template changes to a more conventional two or three column design.
- images and mp3 files should be easy to integrate in the content. Mass uploading to the server should be easy.

The administration should be as easy as possible because it will be used by almost clueless people ;-) .

I am not looking for out-of-the-box solutions here. I don't mind to do lots of custom development. But I want to be sure Drupal can help in the development and has no showstoppers for the above functionality. Ofcourse, if I succeed I have no problem giving the code of the modules back to the community.

Any advice ?

Thanks a lot,

Henk

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Comments

manoochehri’s picture

manoochehri commented

- the site has news divided in sections, no comments needed. The news is automatically archived after a certain date and is from then on only accesible in the 'archive' section.

Yup, Drupal does this... make categories and use those to store content...

- the site needs something like 'send this link to a friend'.

Although it is not ready yet for the 4.5 drupal code, I think that this is being worked on and I believe the CVS version should work ok... (I need it too...)

- the site needs newsletter functionality. The mailings should actually contain a html page that is created in the backend and consists of choosen news topics. What I mean is, an administrator should be able to mark a news story to be included in the mailing.

Interesting feature... WHat CMS have these types of features for example?

- visitors can register themselves and add information about the music band they are playing in. This info however, should not be published until an administrator has approved the info.

Drupal does this...

- when visiting the site, the first page has a separate template with headlines and stuff. After clicking a newstopic or 'read more' or something, the template changes to a more conventional two or three column design.

Hmmm, well many sites don't want this, but I know what you mean. Many have asked for this type of functionality...

- images and mp3 files should be easy to integrate in the content. Mass uploading to the server should be easy.

It is... try one of the many file upload features...

quarky’s picture

quarky commented

Great ! It looks like the only thing I will have to work on is the newsletter feature.
I don't know of any cms that has this.

Regarding the different templates : is it impossible or just a little difficult ?

thanks for the fast answer btw,

Henk

Mr Maggoo’s picture

Mr Maggoo commented

If you want an amazing template that is highly unigue to your site you have to spend a good couple of weeks doing them.

But if you only want to tinker with some exsisting themes to change colours etc it's not that difficult, just a matter of playing with css fiels and images.

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

Hello quarky,

your case is rather typical; Drupal can make exactly the site you want, but the tools you need to have exactly what you want either need to be adjusted or extended to do exactly what you want.

To the answer that you have already received, I'll add that switching templates is not a problem, rather easy, but not built in. It requires somewhere between 3-10 lines of code, depending on your exact needs.

The music and mp3 functionality is particularly interesting to me, and is missing in Drupal almost completely. While there are many ways to upload files, there is only one way, the flexinode mp3 extension, to upload mp3s and have their metadata (ID3) read, and to offer the file as streaming media. Being the author of the field_mp3.inc extension to flexinode, I can tell you that it is limited and not particularly flexible.

The good news is that I will have a beta version of a media module that I've been co-programming in January. Since I haven't mentioned this here yet, I won't spill the beans completely, but will announce it more officially sometime soon (within weeks, not days).

Another area where you will need to extend existing functionality is the HTML email requirement. The easiest way to your goal will be to take an external library that is good at sending HTML email and then let it override the default Drupal functionality. I too need this, and will be writing that code within the next couple of months.

As a programmer you will find that Drupal is a great tool to get to your goal. Drupal gets you most of the way there, but the fine-tuning and exact feature list will require some code to be written.

Administration is great as you can expose only the exact bits that you want to certain user-roles, thus minimizing the chance of having them break things.

There are no showstoppers. I would choose Drupal to make the site you described.

Hope this helps,

- Robert Douglass

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visit me at www.robshouse.net