Hi,
I've been developing for many years and have some experience in PHP, but I'm trying to decide if I switch from our propietary framework to one one more Open Source solutions. One its under my radar it is Drupal, of course :-)
We have several projects where will use Drupal: corporate sites and directories and I'm pretty sure Drupal will work well in those kind of sites. But the question for this post is to know if Drupal it is the appropiate tool to build more "advanced" sites like ecommerce B2B or similar.
For example, we are running a site like freelanceglobal.com. To save your time exploring site features, will give a brief explanation:
-This is a freelancers hire/project posting site like elance.com, getafreelancer.com
-Its a multilingual site, currently: English, German and Spanish
-Know there are two kind of profiles: sellers and buyers, but we are planning to leave only one sometimes could act as provider others as seller
-If you don't know how this kind of sites works: companies post projects looking for a provider
-Providers make a bid
-A talk between both parts starts in a public and private way, providers or sellers make questions and the other part reply
-Buyer select one provider and project starts
-When project ends we got a comission with a minimun ammount
Website will have other features like blog or other kind of contents I'm sure are not a problem for Drupal. Each provider has a minisite with their own profile and portfolio. The most tricky part is about payments because now we are getting the comission only but would like can get money in other ways: featured project, selling services, etc... Is it Drupal suitable for this kind of site? There is any running sample?
Thanks
Jose
Comments
It can be done
I have been involved with a couple of projects sort of along the lines of what you are describing.
Everything that is outside of purchasing can definitely be handled by Drupal along with a few contributed modules. The role system in drupal would allow you to give users the ability to create job postings, and bids could be set up as related pieces of content to that original posting. There are a few different messaging frameworks that would allow for the public/private messaging that you describe.
Right now there are two strong players when it comes to e-commerce in Drupal. The Ecommerce Project is the original solution, and provides all of the e-commerce functionality you would expect. There is the ability for site users to purchase roles on your site (to provide premium access to certain content or features) and a lot of other solutions to common problems. This module package has a pretty steep learning curve, but once you have your head wrapped around it, you will have the ability to create a really custom solution to your problem.
A custom solution with the Ecommerce package inevitably leads to custom modules, that extend the functionality of the project, but the framework is definitely there to pull that off.
The new player on the block for buying in Drupal is Ubercart. Ubercart is the way to go if you have an e-commerce project that needs to be done next week, and you don't care to spend the time customizing it to exact specifications. Definitely watch the Ubercart project, because it seems to be growing fast.