Hi Community,
I'm trying to determine whether drupal is suitable for my next project. I understand what drupal does, and I'd like to know if it's possible to get my project running without too much development effort.
The project is a simple online application to help students practice speaking English. Features are:
- Basic form: A collection of prerecorded questions for students to answer.
- Questions are in a variety of topics, and are organized in 3 types.
- Each question will have transcript text, audio recording, hideable hints, and other meta data.
- For a topic of questions, the application is responsible for randomly choosing a few questions from the topic collection and present them in a specific order.(Though random, application should be able to record whether a certain question has been practiced, and use this information to decide further random results, the goal is to practice as much number of questions as possible, not to practice a single one many times)
- Students may choose to browse limited free content without registration.
- Students may enjoy the capability of tracking progress, making notes, marking difficulty, see more free content by registering.
- Students may choose to view questions by certain criteria, such as their own difficulty rating, or notes.
- Students may choose to purchase extra premium content (questions).
- Application will expand to other fields of English practice.
- It's very likely a future mobile app will use this application to serve contents in a similar way.
On top of my head, I see that 'question' can be put into 'article', while tags can be used to organize ‘question types' and 'topic'. Students' notes or progress can be tracked using 'comments', not sure if 'comments' can be configured to be visible only to the commenter. A practice session can use 'views' to target a series of questions.
But it seems that a lot of work need to be done to put those things together. I'm wondering whether drupal is suitable for such an application. And what module configuration is required, and what development effort is required? Am I going to run into trouble for custom development when a new release of drupal becomes available?
Thank you.
Comments
Belongs in Before You
Belongs in Before You Start.
Questions in the post are:
Is it possible without too much dev effort.' Answer: yes. Modules like Gradebook (D7 version? I do not know) and Moneyscripts subscription modules may help. There are of course other ways.
Is Drupal suitable? Answer: yes.
What module config. required? As said there are many ways to do this. A skilled site builder who has done a few sites at this level of complexity will get most of this done in a couple of weeks, excluding the mobile app. A low-skilled site builder may take a few months.
What development effort? Not much. Possibly fresh dev for random choice of questions. I did think up a workaround for random selection using Views but I have forgotten what it was. Not massively difficult. Mobile app: should be possible with a phone gap type app, so not much fresh dev.
Will custom dev run into trouble with new major version? Of course, always does in Drupal, major version upgrades are horrible. But what else is there?
Digit Professionals
Still possible without too many third party modules?
Thanks John. Sorry for posting in the wrong section.
I'm wondering if I can put it together without third party modules. 'Gradebook' looks obsolete, and I got no results for 'moneyscripts'. I'm sure there are modules to do this, but I wanted to keep things simple at this stage. For 'random articles', I'd better use javascript to solve the problem if possible.
But this is more complicated than I thought. I've been checking around, it appears that it's not possible for 'comments' to be visible only to the 'commenter'. In order for this to be done, I'll need to hired skilled people who develop modules to create such feature. I'm particularly worried about version upgrades because I heard it breaks a lot. I need this project to be sustainable for long term development and extension.
I've also heard of developers who can create modules for 6.x but not 7.x of drupal. That makes me worry about whether this is a viable approach.
Moneyscripts is a set of paid
Moneyscripts is a set of paid modules, not on drupal.org. You can find them via Google.
It is true the Drupal api which module developers should use changes in each version, and that Drupal development seems to be becoming less accessible for untrained programmers.
Digit Professionals