By piddleton on

Hi all, total Drupal newbie here...

I'm a PHP developer starting a site for a local sports club. There will be standard content pages, but I also need to create a database (probably 7-8 tables) that will be used for creating all kinds of game and league statistics. There will be a site admin that enters match scores, and I'd like to programatically update the DB and present customized statistics to all league members via the website.

I'm trying to decide if Drupal, Wordpress, or my own custom site is the best way to go. I want to learn Drupal, but I'm not sure if it will allow me to create custom tables and queries.

Any advice on if Drupal is the right choice if I need to create my own tables, queries, and programming functions? If so, could you recommend a good place--whether this site, online tutorial, textbook--to get more information on how to get started?

Thanks!

Comments

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

http://drupal.org/project/data

john_b’s picture

john_b commented

However, maybe better start with one of the several ready-made solutions eg http://drupal.org/node/66366/

http://groups.drupal.org/sports-club-league-management

There is a German project whose name slips my mind...

Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

imo you do yourself a disservice when you approach drupal with the preconceived idea that you're going to shoe horn custom db structures into a drupal site. Sure there's instances when that's necessary, but it should be the last option not the first.

You should evaluate what drupal can do (including the existing modules john_b mentioned)first-- and with d7 there's A LOT you can do beyond nodes using entities which saves you from a lot of manual db chores.

That said, you can do anything with drupal that you can do with php-- so yes, you can do your own db schema and queries.

piddleton’s picture

piddleton commented

Thanks everyone for your links and tips! These look like great places to start.