By Clover13 on

Basically I'm looking for the following site elements, that are well integrated (or easy to integrate).
Do you believe Drupal is a good selection for these purposes?

1) Forum
- certainly the primary and heaviest used site element
- need a best of breed solution here that is well maintained, comprehensive and has a large support community that offers add-ons or mods to address gaps in the core implementation
- would highly prefer open source so I can modify as I need to, I have the skillset to do the coding, it's always a time issue :)

2) Media/Gallery
- photo and video storage for every user
- auto image/video resizing to help streamline content and minimize storage required, or perhaps allow for high resolution storage (but can add a fee to it if desired)
- want ease of sharing, i.e. user doesn't have to go out and copy & paste urls over and over into IMG tags or (re)upload the same media. I'd like them to be able to have their own media space/interface on the site and manage it (public vs private images, allow others to share or not share, etc), as well as have an easy way to grab the content and put it in a forum thread or blog entry (media button with maybe a popup or AJAX rendered window to select the desired media and then embed it)

3) Blog
- blog site for every user, if they so choose to use one
- again, want an easy hook into media here as described above
- also want an easy way to share the blog in the forum (embed the content)

Comments

bawoor’s picture

bawoor commented

Poin 1 and 3 provides by Core modules. For extend functionallity as poin 2 you need Media module.

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duckzland’s picture

duckzland commented

IMHO :
- Forum
standard drupal forum is adequate in most cases or you can go with advanced forum but it is still no phpBB in terms of add-on and features

- Media Gallery
Several ways to build this, from standard image fields to media module. Image resizing comes with drupal standard.

- Blog
Drupal standard has multi user blog capabilities, linking to gallery is not a problem, module such as views, user dashboards, panels etc can be useful here

Verdict?
If you know how to build drupal site properly, those task is not really hard to do

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Clover13’s picture

Clover13 commented

I'm running just a forum right now (myBB) with a number of add-ons that users have come to enjoy.
The forum is without a doubt the most key element of my site, user activity hinges on it.
It is where most site activity and therefore structure, moderation, features needs to exist.
Everything else is more so just to make it easy for users to immerse themselves and their content (which they are very willing to do, they just need the tooling to make it as easy as possible).

The media integration (for all users) and blogging for a large subset of users is definitely an integral part I would like to add.
It really boils down to having a feature rich environment that facilitates user engagement. The average user is not internet savvy in my medium, so I'd like to make it as easy as possible for them to engage and manage/add/share content.