Drupal or CivicSpace?

Hello Rachel,
If I understand correctly, CivicSpace is actually a modified Drupal bundled into a more ready made package. I have never used CivicSpace, only Drupal. As for advantages/disadvantages....If you use Drupal, you will most likely have no problems if you later want to use CivicSpace. However, and I'm no expert, most likely the same cannot be said if you begin with CivicSpace. Aside from all the modules and talk about this being better than that and blablabla we must endure when making such a decision as you are now faced with, I have always tried to stick with basic facts. Drupal has a large user base and many developers. Projects like CivicSpace are derived from Drupal because Drupal code is clean and it's architecture pretty well thought out. The developers update the Drupal series very frequently...we are now waiting on 4.6 stable while trying out 4.6rc. While the developers are not always accessible and many forum questions will go unanswered leaving you to "figure it out yourself", many questions do get answered and I have been able to solve 99.9 percent of the issues I've faced. I'm not a programmer, I'm a mathematician. I know prolog, lisp, and c. I use oracles databases. However, because of Drupal and it's easy to use platform and clean code, I've gotten a good idea of php/mysql in addition to making some interesting research applications. Also, and it's only my opinion, the people here are very different from those you find at mambo, plone, or typo3 forums. The people here will help if they can...you may just need some patience. Hope this helps.

cheers,
larry

--There are no Kangaroos in Austria--

What's the main reason people choose CivicSpace over Drupal?

Well, like DrupalEd is meant for educational use, Civicspace uniqueness is that it can be used for running a political/activist campaign site, having originated from the Deanspace web site for Howard Dean's presidential run.

Aside from the special modules that make the difference between Drupal and CS, you need to look at the new event module and the CiviCRM module (both in the works) to understand how CS primarily fits into the non-profit, activist space- this is not to say you can't use Drupal for that purpose or that CivicSpace can't be used for generic sites.