Hi,
I have a great interest in rare music (70's library, funk,soul and electronic) and have been collecting a lot over the past years. I am now very keen in starting up a non-profit website catered for vinyl collectors who may already have a vast collection of unknown hidden gems and would like to share their interest to the public, like i do. I hope to built up a massive database of rare collectible music online and to help myself and others in tracking down more dusty grooves which have been lost or forgotten.
Technically, i have knowledge in HTML, CSS, server management and recently some basic MySQL4 with PHP5. As you can see i have an immense learning to catch up in programming, therefore is looking at building a site without too much technical work (even though i am keen to learn but i am building this site on my own and have many other work to consider as well).
What i require for my site is:
- Category for genres/artists/songs
- A - Z listings
- A minute audio sample clips for each song
- Users are able to contribute their own music and upload their own mp3s
- Rating for each song
- Voting system (i think Drupal already has one)
- Fourm (i think Drupal already has one)
One great example of a site i want to create, would be across between:
http://www.funk45.com/ (good looking site with audio clips) and http://www.discogs.com/ (good informative website)
There are more but generally most importantly is the user's contribution- where they can register and help post up new info and tracks.
From browsing on the internet, i have come across a phpnuke module called Top Music Module (www.sergids.com) which seems to have all i need except for user being able to contribute by adding their own mp3s. Also, i am keen to have a gallery showing some album covers. Can these modules be integrated into Drupal easily or you'll need to port it?
I did find another Nuke CMS called CPG Nuke Dragonfly (http://www.cpgnuke.com/) which has nuke/coppermine and phpBB2 all in one but to use Top Music Module you will need to port it into Dragonfly and this i don't know how to do it.
An alternative would be to use any modules/blocks to download that already exist that can be added into Drupal to build up such a site. I will be happy to look into this if someone can kindly provide me a list of Drupal modules and blocks that they think i can use to put them together which will be enough to implement such a site.
Thank you,
S
Comments
seeing nobody else answered your question..
Hiya..
Seeing nobody else answered your question...I think drupal would be a good choice..you will, however need to add on a few extra modules to get to where you want...which is not a major problem.
To answer your questions...briefly..out of the box drupal will not do what you want to do. But with existing drupal modules added on...it can do everything you want and more.
If you check out the modules section of the site...it should give you an idea to what is already available.
You wouldn't need to port across anything to get the MP3 uploads working...check out the media module linked below..or search for Media Handling..
http://drupal.org/node/19304
Definitely check out the FLEXINODE module..which allows you to setup your own content types..
http://drupal.org/node/5737
the A-Z artist listing module is on here somewhere..just do a search..it maybe hidden away in the CVS repository...where drupallers put their contributed modules before they become a release.
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/
For your album covers...the existing IMAGE module is probably your best bet and with your knowledge of php & cSS you can override the default layouts to come up with a coppermine type layout.
Themeing or skinning drupal is simple if you know a bit of CSS & a bit of PHP which you do...so you are laughing. Recommend you go for a phptemplate based theme to start with and bespoke that to suit your needs.
the handbook goes into more detail and how to develop very sophisticated layouts...so rather than just being restricted to a CSS theme system...you can get stuck in to how each page is constructed...
Hope that is of use.
As a final tip..drupal 4.6. has only just been released...so you might find that there are more extra modules available for that version.
I have been using drupal 4.5. for a while and it is very stable & robust.
Best of luck with your project...drop me an email or post a message if you get a chance..am always looking for good music related sites..especially drupal.
Dub
DUBLIN DRUPALLER
___________________________________________________
A drupal user by chance and a dubliner by sheer luck.
Using Drupal to help build Artist & Band web communities.
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate
Many thanks for your input,
Many thanks for your input, i will start looking into the different modules and see if i can mix and match to build my site.
One final question, is Drupal quite fast? I am thinking ahead here because i don't want to end up spending hours and months developing my site and suddenly realise 6 months down the line when my database is bloated with data that the site starts to slow down to the pace of a snail. I have heard comments like that about PHP-Nuke and Post-Nuke. That's is why i am looking for an alternative Nuke CMS. The other one i can think of which is suppose to be fast and stable is CPG Nuke Dragonfly, though i am not sure.
Thank you,
Been allright for me.
Drupal has always been fast for me. Drupal.org is fairly large. This is an old post but has some sizing numbers: http://drupal.org/node/10000
-sp
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Test site...always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
yeah..it's quick..
The page load time seems to be very quick with Drupal...and I've noticed some very big sites using drupal which would suggest it would stand up to any benchmark scrutiny. As the other poster said..this drupal.org site is very busy with a lot of members and a lot of posts..
By the way..there's a typo in my previous message (I can't edit it) ..I meant there are more modules available for Drupal 4.5.x than there is for 4.6 because 4.6 has just been released.It reads the other way around in my previous post.
hope that helps
Dub
DUBLIN DRUPALLER
___________________________________________________
A drupal user by chance and a dubliner by sheer luck.
Using Drupal to help build Artist & Band web communities.
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate
this is do-able
I definitely think you could build this site with Drupal, or Civicspace (www.civicspace.org). However, like others have said, it won't work right out of the box, but probably will be much easier than trying to port/connect all that stuff you talked about, once you get over the Drupal learning curve.
- Category for genres/artists/songs
Can do this with Drupal's built in "taxonomy" or classification system. You can build and categorize the albums any way you'd like and by as many different vocabularies as you like.
- A - Z listings
I've seen this been done before, I'll look into how others did it.
- A minute audio sample clips for each song
File attachment module is included in the standard Drupal distribution, which allows file upload attachments and lets you set permissions for how big the file can be and which users can do it.
- Users are able to contribute their own music and upload their own mp3s
Raw functionality for this is do-able using the file attachment module. Again, nothing extra to install, it is in Drupal core.
- Rating for each song
I haven't seen a cool star system or anything but you could probably do this. Might want to check node moderation module.
- Voting system (i think Drupal already has one)
There is a content moderation system. I'm not quite sure what you'll be voting on. If you mean polls and surveys, check out the poll and survey modules.
- Fourm (i think Drupal already has one)
Correct, already included. You can configure this any way you'd like.
-Image gallery
Check out the image gallery module. It could work for album covers.
Also, in order to do what you need, I would recommend checking out the flexinode module, which will let you define a node/content type. This means you can define an "album" content type, give it a taxonomy, audio clip sample, title, description, allow for comments, etc. and then will can let you display it in a table - or you could modify it to display it on the page in an A-Z listing ( I think).
Another idea would be to join the civicspace community mailing list on civicspacelabs.org or the drupal.org mailing list and ask your questions there - might get a better response.
You can read the list of available modules on the drupal module site. They are version specific, meaning they aren't backwards or forwards compatible.
Good luck!
Farsheed
Top 10 Chart
Say users on radio call in and vote for a song, how do i make the Top 10 chart? cant seem to figure it out, i think views can handle it but i dont know how to go about it. the top 10 chart wont be user submitted on the site but on a call in show.