I am a web developer at a charity in the UK called Action Medical Research.
At the moment we are scoping out our new website which we hope to have a lot more functionality than our current site.
My predecessor built the site using Savant2 PHP template engine with some bespoke modules for event registration and online sponsorship.
Our event registration involves getting users contact information for legal reasons and also we need to get payment, which at the moment we use a company called Secure Trading but I am not sure how set in stone that is. We also need extra information for each event which differs from event to event. Some events will need passport details some won't, some of our bike rides have more than 1 route so the user has a choice of routes to ride.
Once a user has successfully registered (a success once all data has been validated and payment succeeded. Validation is only simple online, ever participant is contact anyway so any bad information will be rectified. Validation only really needs to be to make sure only numbers used for telephone numbers and the like) an online sponsorship account is opened for the user which is linked to that event. The user can then give out a specific url to their friends to direct them to that page, as short as possible. The user will be able to modify that page like on MySpace or possibly more controlled like Facebook.
All the address information will be held on if they do other events to quicken up the registration process in the future.
We also want to give the user the option of storing their credit card data so they don't have the retype everything, which means the data needs to be encrypted in to the database.
We have around 6,000-10,000 sponsorship transactions a month and a lot more hits elsewhere on the site so performance would have to be good.
There are other aspects to the website but these will be a lot easier to do, such as Press releases and possibly staff blogs etc.
I am wondering whether all this is possible within Drupal? I have always thought of CMS as being inflexible to too much modification.
There are a lot more factors than what I have posted but I didn't want to put a 20 page scoping document on here.
Thank you very much for any replies, hopefully Drupal will be perfect for us as it looks very promising indeed.
Comments
You Can Do It With Drupal
Based on my knowledge of Drupal I believe that you can do all the things you want to do using Drupal. The key piece of functionality seems to be the connection to the payment gateway. So I recommend that you investigate the eCommerce module to see if that can meet your payment need. Everything else you mentioned with respect to features is pretty standard for Drupal site implementations.
Rob Safuto
Learn By The Drop is a place to learn Drupal. If you're new to Drupal I recommend having a look at my Beginner's Guide To Drupal.
Thank you
Thank you very much for your quick reply. I will have a look at the eCommerce module and see if it can be tailored to our needs.
I guess I have a lot of reading up to about Drupal module development.
Is it worth aiming to release the site using D6? The only Drupal development book I have seen is for D5 and there are very little D6 modules available at the moment. D7 appears to be coming out in a year too so it's hard to know where D6 stands. Is it just a small stepping stone? If so is it worthy of it's giant leap in version number. Usability wise it's a lot better and that is clear to see. I just don't want to focus on a version then find that all the modules will be outdated for the new much superior version of Drupal, but on the other hand you can't just wait for the next version or you will be waiting for an eternity.
James
Action Medical Research - www.action.org.uk
James T
Action Medical Research - www.action.org.uk
It might turn out that not
It might turn out that not all Drupal 6.0 modules you need for all the functionality are ready. It'd be absolutely OK to start with the very stable & proven Drupal 5.7 and when all the modules you need for Drupal 6.0 are ready, you upgrade, which should not be difficult [I have repeatedly read similar opinions expressed here on this topic in the forums in response to similar questions].
If all you need for Drupal 6.0 is available, then it'd be ok to use it.
D7 will not be ready for a long time and should not come in question at this time.
Thanks for your reply. In
Thanks for your reply. In that case I will start developing for D5. Although I assume any modules will have to be rewritten for D6? Although this wouldn't be too much of a problem if the database is scoped out properly.
Action Medical Research - www.action.org.uk
James T
Action Medical Research - www.action.org.uk
the modules for D5 do not
the modules for D5 do not work with D6 BUT, they can be adapted. Unless you need custom modules, which in which case would need to be changed on upgrading, there should be d6 equivalents of the current D5 versions developed soon or later. For a community site I run based on D5 one by one of the D6 modules are slowly being released but it will take a while for all since they are quite a number - several dozen. That is not big deal for me, though as my site is fully functional.
In that case when upgrading, the database is also adjusted accordingly.
That is as I thought. I
That is as I thought. I think I will end up making a custom events module bespoke to our charity due to the amount of customisation each event needs. I would of though the learning curve from 5 to 6 will not be that much, just learning new functions and hooks etc that are introduced and new best practices.
At the moment Drupal will most likely be our choice of CMS.
Action Medical Research - www.action.org.uk
James T
Action Medical Research - www.action.org.uk
Ubercart
We switched from the eCommerce module to the Übercart module, which seems to be more actively developed.
-- Walt
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