PhpBB Forum and WordPress Blog and Classifieds and Social Networking - Is Drupal the right Solution?
ethanre - March 13, 2008 - 14:00
I would like to build a site that utilizes powerful and easy to setup Forum (like PhpBB ) and a powerful easy to use Blog (like WordPress ), also have users be able to create Pages (like a wiki) with versioning /page history and the ability to undo changes and track changes by users.
Is Drupal the right Solution? or should I use all of these PhpBB and multi user WordPress instead to archive my forums/blog/collaborative pages objective?
One main concern is that these are all SEO friendly, currently WP and phpBB do a good job of being SEO friendly also they offer many social networking plugins that I must have if I go with Drupal.
I'd like to use Drupal 5.x. I'm relatively new to Drupal any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks
More info
I need single sign on, one user ID per person to be shared across the Forum, Blog, Page creation, and classifieds if I include classified. The classifieds would be nice to have but it's not a must.
I don't care for the wiki syntax or wiki freelinking. I need a wysiwyg editor.
Additional Questions:
Easy Linking: It would be nice to have a pop-up menu with all site pages to select a page and create a link to it, or manually type in the URL in the pop-up. Does this exist in Drupal?
3rd Party Integration: I am leaning towards integrating phpBB and WP into Drupal since phpBB and WP do what they were designed to do so well, any thoughts on this? Does Drupal offer modules that are as good as phpBB and WP?
To Drupal or not to Drupal: What value would using Drupal add and why shouldn't I just integrate phpBB and WP together without Drupal?
Thanks
Ethan
phpBB
I think using phpBB would be a good idea since Drupal's Forum is not quite as nice. Using phpBB3 would probably be best...
I am not sure about WP integration.
__________
Eric Aitala - f1m@f1m.com
The Formula 1 Modeling Website
www.f1m.com
Hmm
I'm a little surprised that you're not advising me to use Drupal as a way to combine all these excellent solutions into one. Is this even possible, based on what I read in other posts integrating phpBB into Drupal is a pain.
Help me decide which route to choose, I'm in a pickle.
Thanks
Ethan
...
Bridging Drupal to another module is always going to be a pain. In the case of phpBB, it can be done and there is a module for it. It's not going to be as nicely integrated as using the Drupal forum but phpBB has some features that Drupal's still lacks, mainly on the administration end such as merging threads together or moving multiple threads at once. If you are ok with less administrative control, Drupal's forums are a good choice.
As to WP, there's really not much poiint in linking WP to Drupal. Drupal has its own blog module or you can use cck/views for it.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
New from PostNuke
Well, I am new to running Drupal, having used PostNuke in the past. My users are very used to phpBB - PN uses a module which wraps phpBB2. I don't think they will adapt to Drupal's Forum system easily so the phpBB3 module looks the way to go for me.
I've been pretty happy with the Drupal-Gallery integration, so I hope things go smooth with phpBB3 - especially since I am going to try to do an update from the PN module, then use the Drupal module.
Eric
__________
Eric Aitala - f1m@f1m.com
The Formula 1 Modeling Website
www.f1m.com
I'm still confused.. should
I'm still confused.. should I use Drupal or not. I need 3 main features, Blog, Forum, and Page creation/collaboration. I've used and like phpbb and wordpress previously and wish I could just plug them into Drupal or just share a theme and login/user info.
Thanks
Ethan
I'd use Drupa to provide
I'd use Drupa to provide your pages and blogging features. That means blogs / pages are indexed by drupal and doing a search will bring back page / blog nodes. Drupal is fairly easy to configure as a blog so it's not worth the hassle of integrating wordpress and the limitations that goes with bridging.
Forum wise, as you say people are familiar with using phpBB / vbulletin. They offer greater features than drupals forum and have many modules themselfs. You can bridge the logins, theme the forum to integrate with the site as said, the only problem is maintenance and forum posts will not be indexed by the main drupal search.
If you go the drupal forum route you can theme it to act as vbulletin, and then posts will be indexed by drupals search and everything is integrated. You will loose features, but your life becomes eaiser maintenance wise.
I agree, I've done a lot of
I agree,
I've done a lot of researching and I decided to use Drupal for my Collaborative Document Writing site, when I need forums I can integrate phpBB.
I love the features Drupal 6 has, but many of the modules I would like to use are not Drupal 6 compliant.
I wish I could use Drupal 6 right now since the site is empty.
Why not try it?
Start with Drupal. Turn on the blog module (if you want multiple people to have blogs) and forum module. If you're used to phpbb, add advanced forum. It's still in alpha but is fairly stable and will be less of a shock than the default look (which is what you see on drupal.org). Grab a premade theme that's close to what you like and play around a bit. If you like it, great, build a real site. If you find you can't get along with advanced forum administration controls then have a look at the phpbb bridge.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
Does Drupal offer all the modules that WP offers as plugin
I have been a Drupal user for a little over 3 months. The biggest issue I faced was not knowing that a module exited.
Now, I have a nice Drupal website that utilizes CCK, Views, and SEO, and more. In total I have 60 modules active. I love how flexible Drupal is where I could create my own Node types, then display the nodes in a table using views etc.. But it took me 2 months to get to this point mainly because of how hard it was finding Modules, and even worse not knowing that I needed certain ones to start with.
It is not fair comparing Drupal to WordPress, WP is just a blogging tool, Drupal is much more.
Having said that I have a couple decisive questions for all the seasoned Drupal users here.
1- Does Drupal offer all the Modules that WP currently offers? (I did not go through all the plug-ins list for WP nor did I go over all of Drupal's modules to compare them. But for some of you seasoned web gurus I hope you have better and more developed views than mine.)
2- Are new Drupal modules developed on regular basis in order to keep up with "trends" on the web and as a result provide similar functionalities to what WP plug-ins offer? WP seems to have new plugins all the time and keeps up with what's famous and new online. Does Drupal have similar development efforts to WP?
(For example WP plug-ins offer movable widgets in the side bar, tag clouds, mybloglog plugins, anti spam plug-ins, contact forms, easy linking to other pages (popup menu with all pages and linking to a page by just selecting it from this popup) pinging, gravatars (yahoo avatars) etc? )
Thanks
Ethan
Read about my search for a CMS
WP
Well, I'm not familiar with WP modules, so it's hard to say if Drupal has them all. But Drupal has > 1500 of them so there's a good chance. For the list you gave:
movable widgets in the side bar - No clue what this means
tag clouds - Tagadelic
mybloglog plugins - Don't know
anti spam plug-ins - captcha, spam and others
contact forms - contact in core or webform
easy linking to other pages - Don't know
pinging - ping module in core
gravatars - gravatars module
In general, just find a couple good keywords for whatever functionality you need and search http://drupalmodules.com/
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
Coulee Region
Michelle,
Thanks,
I saw Blogs and Forums on your website "Coulee Region".
I assume you are using Advanced Forum for your Forums, are you?
Have you considered using Avatars, Gravatars (only works for Drupal 6), Mybloglog widget (only works in Drupal 4.7), Tag Cloud and other Social Networking tools for your Blog or site in general?
...
I do use avatars. Gravatars doesn't work on 5.x as you pointed out and it's not a real priority for me anyway since I'd never even heard of them until about a week ago. I haven't done much with the blogs, yet, but I'll probably stick some extras on there once people start using them. Tag clouds I really don't like, though I do use it as one of the photo options. "Other Social Networking tools" is pretty vague so I can't really answer that. The site isn't done so I'm sure I'll add more as I go along.
Michelle
--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
Very good job on the
Very good job on the website...
I looked at the other site for all of WI, they used vbulletin... Too many choices that I like, Drupal, WP, PhpBB, vBulletin... all could be used for a social CMS website. I am trying to think of the longer term, long term support and development.
My main concern is being able to update the site to have the newest trends (clouds, mybloglog, etc..)
I worry that as newer technology comes along and new trends pop-up that Drupal modules would be developed for Drupal 6 but not Drupal 5. I prefer 5 at the moment because it has more modules.
Is this a valid concern?
Versions
Drupal 5 is going to be the version of choice for SN sites for some time, probably at least until midsummer. Sure, it's going to reach a point where all the cool modules are only or mainly for D6 but you're going to have that with any application. If you take care not to hack core and document any customizations, upgrading to D6 in about 6 months to catch up to the mainstream shouldn't be too bad.
As to your other question, these are the modules I use on CRO right now:
acl, ad, admin_menu, advanced_forum, advanced_profile, advpoll, asset, auto_nodetitle, buddylist, bueditor, captcha, cck, cck_address, cck_fieldgroup_tabs, comment_mover, comment_upload, content_type_cleanup, cromods, custom_breadcrumbs, customerror, date, devel, ed_readmore, email, event, eventrepeat, filefield, fivestar, flatcomments, forum_access, forward, globalredirect, gmap, google_analytics, guestbook, hierarchical_select, imagecache, imagefield, invite, jquery_interface, jquery_update, jstools, legal, link, location, logintoboggan, map_location, me, node_import, nodefamily, nodeprofile, nodewords, notify, page_title, panels, patches, pathauto, privatemsg, quote, robotstxt, signature_forum, sitemenu, smileys, subform_element, subscriptions, tagadelic, tagadelic_views, taxonomy_batch_operations, taxonomy_defaults, taxonomy_hide, thickbox, token, update_status, upload_preview, usernode, userpoints, views, views_bonus, views_bookmark, views_fastsearch, views_filterblock, votingapi
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
Thanks for the list.
Thanks for the list.
What Modules did you use?
What Modules did you use on your website besides Avatars?
Michelle, you mentioned in
Michelle, you mentioned in your Coulee Region website that you had performance issues that forced you to take the site down to the basics. You mentioned making poor decisions early on. Could you please elaborate a little on what you think the poor decisions were so I could avoid going down that route please?
Thanks
...
Well, the problems that caused me to strip the site down for a few days turned out to actually be some oddball php module and not my fault at all. But the poor decisions I referred to were mostly putting way too much into the theme. This was the site I learned Drupal/PHP on so I didn't know the best way of doing things. I'm slowly redoing things, now, but thankfully I don't have to totally start over now that I realize the other problem wasn't my fault. :)
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
Thank you and good luck.
Thank you and good luck
Thanks also for your work on the Advanced Forum project.. This is awesome!
I just published an article about my search for what I called The Ultimate Super Solution (i.e. some platform to do Blogging, Forums, ecommerce, CMS, Wiki etc..). This article is about Drupal and the result of my long search. Have a look here I'd love all your comments.
Thanks
Ethan