YoNinja.com is a travel site for people living and traveling through Asia. YoNinja is your guide to Asia and a site to share your travels and experiences with the world! YoNinja is a community of world travelers and is filled with listings of restaurants, hotels, bars, activities, and more. Enough to be your complete guide to your city or any city that you plan to travel to.
If a listing does not exist, YoNinja users can add their listing and share with the world. The site is feature rich, with users able to favorite, like, share, comment, and review listings! We also reward our users when they contribute content to the site in the form of user points that can later be redeemed for coupons, vouchers, cash, and more!
YoNinja currently focuses on Japan and Hong Kong with the ability to also add listings for just about any country in the world. As the site grows, we will make necessary changes to include all countries. Currently we support 4 different languages, English, Japanese, Chinese Traditional (Hong Kong and Taiwan) and Chinese Simplified (People's Republic of China).
We researched several CMS systems (Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc.) and after testing each one out, we ended up choosing Drupal. We have been extremely happy (and impressed) with Drupal as a CMS and use it for all of our sites now! For YoNinja.com, Drupal perfectly matched our needs:
1.) scalable
2.) a reliable framework for managing user supplied content
3.) a huge repository of ready to go modules that instantly added functionality to our site
4.) a huge active online community of Drupal users, programmers, and developers
5.) great bilingual support!
YoNinja.com initially started as an online directory of places in Japan on a different platform. It consisted of restaurants, hotels, and bars and was a flat static website with basic information about these listings. Somewhat like a yellow pages directory. We wanted to take the site and transform it into a community site where users could add their own listings, as well as comment and rate those listings. We also wanted the site to be multilingual and be easy to maintain.
We researched a few content management systems and ultimately decided on Drupal. We had some big requirements for the CMS. We needed something that could scale easily, had performance features built-in and would support server-side performance tools/software. We wanted something that was very modular and would allow us to implement rich functionality with little to no programming. We also wanted something that had good multilingual support and would work well with the module software that we would add in. Drupal was able to fulfill all of these requirements.
The biggest help was the drupal.org module forums and Drupal Linkedin.com groups and their users. We were able to make a very dynamic website rich in features and with a lot of social networking functionality very easily and quickly (and with little programming). That's just the beauty of Drupal and its modular system.
We unfortunately haven't been able to make any community contributions at this point in time. However we would like to create a module that would support establishment hours of operation. There are currently two modules in the community that create fields for operating hours, but they are very specific in their usage. We are currently working on creating a generic operating hours module that will enable adding operating hours to nodes with customization on number of fields, date ranges, and be as compact or as detailed as possible on the add node pages. If anyone would be interested in helping create such a module, we would be keen to speak with you!
