Dear Drupalists,
For a school project I'm trying to find the ideal solution. I have the choice of creating the project from scratch and use a framework like CI or CakePHP to build around MVC from the ground up (which will give me alot of learning experience) or I can try and discover Drupal. If I choose to go with Drupal (advised by coordinator) I will have a much steeper learning curve but I've received info from people that Drupal already has nearly all the functionality I need for my project.
My project is to build a web application for a race sport organisation with the functionality for external event organizers to add games/matches to this web application which keeps a ranking of all matches that are offered (which this organisation can accept or deny) during a season. From this ranking at the end of a season groups will be drawn which places the competitors into correct groups according to their level (earned points).
Main functionalities are:
the registering of organizers
the offering of games/matches
the entering of a match result afterwards
adding new competitors when they are not know yet in the DB when entering a result.
the admin of the organistion itself should be able to:
accept or deny offered matches
edit matches and results
And a ranking which should be automatically updated after new results are added.
So my main question is:
Since my project mainly involves forms and working with data in these forms, is Drupal a good choice for this and are there certain modules that I can already gain info on to see if they fit my needs.
Comments
Yes, you can do all that
Yes, you can do all that without writing any code, most of it using Drupal core. You may also want to use Views module to display results. Workbench suite of modules may be useful for managing content and rights to add content.
There are sports-specific modules (Google, see e.g. http://drupal.org/node/900580), but you should not use them, and you should only use Organic Groups module, unless you cannot do everything without them, partly because the extra complexity brings problems with it.
Digit Professionals
Start from the perspective
Start from the perspective that everything that's going to need a form to create it is likely to be a node, and create a content type for each different type of thing (not to the lowest level - you wouldn't want different content types for 100m and 200m races, for example). You can then create fields for the data requirements of each of your content types.
One of the key items here is going to be a calendar so look at modules which relate to that.
This is a pretty challenging application so be prepared to go backwards and forwards with your design as you try things out. Take code and data backups frequently, so you can change your mind about what works.
Good luck!
Thanks
Thanks for the advice already ! Will surely take a look at those modules.