ok, being more than a 2 year old member, this may sound odd but I have history of asking such stupid questions :) and is not ashamed to ask ...
The thing is, How flexible is drupal so I can do Anything and I mean anything with it. Like after building a site, if I feel like..Hmmm lets add this custom feature and than after few months, again I feel like lets add this feature etc. I will ofcourse pay good money for the work to be done but was wondering, what if the Coders say, Hey, this can't be done by Drupal, you chose wrong platform. Go with RoR or Django!
Also how easy is to port the stuff from Drupal to some other web framework or architecture ? I know the questions are vague but I just want to know what do you think about it.
Also can some one point me to the high level architecture stuff for building sites ? something drupal or non drupal related ?
Thanks
Comments
I am going to tell you
I am going to tell you something and chances are you will still want an answer in a different format. Are you ready for your answer?
Drupal Can! :)
Drupal is really a framework. The frame is there, now you just build on top of it. You scale or add to the frame as you like, create mashups, your own web service / application - you name it it can be done.
If you want to port data, that is somewhat easier than recoding functionality. You really should see some show cases and case studies:
http://drupal.org/cases
http://groups.drupal.org/node/6876
I know that is not what you are looking to hear (as most newbies as well) but it is the truth.
Best of luck and welcome to the community.
===
Elvis McNeely
Drupal services: http://www.elvisblogs.org/drupal
No you can't
I have been using Drupal for three years and I have heard stories about facebook type sites being built on drupal. I had a newspaper sites and I have tried six different drupal coders to give me a newspaper site. And they have not. The thing is Drupal is just a platform and people get carried away thinking it comes packaged with all sorts of goodies that you will click on and Aloha, have a new web site with all functionalities.
It won't. And very few people can build you a really good website managing massive amounts of data. And if you are going to spend that kind of manpower and money you have to ask if Drupal is the best platform. In fact you may not even have the choice. The CMS company you choose will have its own platform.
Drupal is one of the better platforms for a mid sized non-complicated content site. If you ask too much more of it then you are either a coder who is dedicating his life to this noble task or a Paul Allen.
There are other problems: Even if you have the functionalities you cannot find the themes. If you find the theme, its never really "good to go" unless its a plain vanilla page with a picture on the top. Then there are constant safety patches and upgrades. My Drupal sites have been hacked twice.
So why do I stick with it because I am stuc with it. I have transferred most of my sites to wordpress and even Joomla and I am very happy with them.
Three years ago I put out an RFP to build and ecademy like simple social networking site. I could not get one . I spent $1000 and I got nothing. Meantime myspace and facebook took off and I started hearing these stories about Drupal can do this and that and that. But if a company is committed to spending large sums of money and has the manpower you can build it on any number of platforms and Drupal is one of the good open source one's but certainly not the best or most useful.
Sorry to dissapoint but thats just my experience of three years.
2 Different thoughts :) Ok,
2 Different thoughts :)
Ok, How about if I say, I have a budget of $25k ? than can I make a site like Myspace and Facebook using drupal (with heavy customization) ?
@poseidon123, aloemantra
@poseidon123, aloemantra point of view is because he wasn't willing to spend the money for a site. There are probably 5 jobs a day that come through drupal.org looking for someone do to some work very cheaply. Like we have a magic wand or something :) (sssh, I do have one - don't tell the other devs).
A MySpace clone or FaceBook, no, but a nice site. For $25k you can build a nice social site aesthetically and functionally. If you are porting old content / users in, that will raise the price - obviously. Just take a look at many of the social sites built by the larger Drupal shops. There are plenty examples available. http://drupal.org/cases
Regards
===
Elvis McNeely
Drupal services: http://www.elvisblogs.org/drupal
@aloemantra Do you think
@aloemantra
Do you think facebook built their site for less than $1000? Think about it.
I have built two social networking sites with Drupal and both were under $20k (each). So it can be done, but not with $1k. Drupal is a framework. If I would have to rebuild those same sites without no framework, starting from scratch, you are talking hours and hours, not a single person could do on a tight schedule.
If you spent your money on a dev who promised you the world, you got what you paid for - hot air. Go to any reputable company (that doesn't use a framework) and ask for a social site, you are going to pay a minimmum of $25k and I have no doubt some will quote $90k.
===
Elvis McNeely
Drupal services: http://www.elvisblogs.org/drupal
It's all a function of time or money
As everyone else has said - it's a framework and you can do anything you want with it. What you can't do is simply install it, add a few modules and end up with a site that's going to be the next facebook. That takes modification, streamlining and more modification.
I think the original poster is asking the wrong question. Instead of asking if Drupal is the right CMS to use as the next facebook, start at the beginning and figure out what you want to build, who's going to use it and what functionality you really need. Then you can evaluate the various open source platforms to see if any of them are close to what you need. None of them will fit exactly - nothing that offers something for everyone will be perfect for any one project. Your choices are now to start with a blank text file or take the best match open source solution and modify it to suit your needs. You will never get it for $1000 unless you invest your own time and don't consider the time you spent as $ lost.
I built www.watchjeffersoncounty.net using Drupal (4.7?) in 2005 and have maintained it since then. It's by no means high traffic on a national scale, but we do have a lot of local members - about 10,000 pageviews per month. Every time I've upgraded it I struggled with whether or not I should simply drop Drupal and start from scratch. Drupal has a lot of features I don't need or want, it's cumbersome, uses more of my server resources than I care for, forms are horrible (in my opinion) but in the end it saves me lots of time. And what it does well, it does very well. Building and maintaining a useful custom site that does exactly what you want with Drupal is closer to a $90,000 investment than a $1,000. But building from scratch would cost more.
Thanks for replying
Thanks for replying everyone, let me put the reason why I asked this question. Its pretty obvious that I am not in the position to hire a team of coders and spend $100k when I am not sure the idea will work or not!
What I can do is, Test the idea on small scale, let me spend $5k right now on drupal and lets see if it clicks. If It works and pulls the crowd, than I can spend more money to scale it up and up and up. :)
So what I was asking was, is that kind of scaling possible ? people talk alot about php sucks and why DJango and Ruby on Rails rocks, so will a site on drupal be as good as something built on RoR or on Django ? Why other than DZone, no Big social networking site is built on drupal ?
I just want to make sure that I don't have to leave drupal once the site becomes big and I start thinking, that choosing drupal was not a right decision. I do love drupal by the way :) *Hugs and Kisses*
@poseidon123, What makes you
@poseidon123,
What makes you think there are no large social sites built on Drupal? Fast Company is a magazine based site but has plenty of social ties to it. So is Popular Science. What makes you think making Drupal into a social platform is hard?
For $5k, you won't have much left after designing the site and implementing a theme. The most expensive costs for Drupal (or any CMS for that matter) is building custom modules and getting the data output nice and pretty as your designer / styler wants. Again, the framework is there but to spiff it up - theming, it costs money. If I were to take a survey of all costs involved for my clients, theming the output is definitely greater than 30% of their costs - for those projects that have design work and customizations / module work.
Each time you add / create a new module, normally a block or view is implemented which needs theming. I am talking about attractive sites here. It you don't care about the look / brand / user stickiness etc, then your $5k will go much further.
===
Elvis McNeely
Drupal services: http://www.elvisblogs.org/drupal
Elvis, theming is my last
Elvis, theming is my last concern :) I am building a content website and I dont think getting all that flashy stuff is required. So this should save me good money. And yes, I will be spending most of the money on module development only
Re: No you can't
aloemantra wrote:
> I had a newspaper sites and I have tried six different drupal coders to give me a newspaper site. And they have not.
Well, there is for example the New York Observer, that relaunched its web site using Drupal. The interesting article New York Observer - a newspaper site explains how they did it.
try looking at Ecademy
www.ecademy.com was built using Drupal. It's a successful social networking site, as is this one.
All of the above comments have merit but you need to think about whether Facebook funcionality is what you want or a simply a site that is stable and connects people which Drupal can comfortably do.
Training in Leicestershire and throughout the East Midlands, UK>
What does it cost?
I think the correct way to put the question would be if you are willing to spend $25 k or $100 k to build a major social networking site, then would you choose Drupal? And why? Would drupal be the first choice because of the platform, modules, built in fuctions?
I believe we forget that a vast majority of users of CMS sites are not exactly coders. When they come to a wordpress/ drupal/ joomla platform they are looking for plug-and play ease of use and some pretty themes to go with. A lot of people do not realise when they ask for a theme that they actually are asking for a whole site to be designed. And making a site that has to be interactive is always expensive no matter what platform you build it on.
Drupal is not an exception. Having said that, perhaps people will start putting time and cost of their demo sites so we amateurs can dream and then budget our ambitions. Otherwise its just numbers being thrown around.
I asked a newspaper case study what their budget was. I have not heard yet. I do not think it should be a great secret.
How about everyone mention time and cost when they show off their sites. That would be so useful and will manage so many expectations.. it will give a huge boost to real site building.
As for making a social network - just do it on www. ning.com and do not bother with Drupal.
Some related links
Social Networking Sites (Drupal group)
http://groups.drupal.org/social-networking-sites
Drupal Groups
http://groups.drupal.org
DrupalSN - Drupal Social Network
http://drupalsn.com
http://drupal.org/node/300255
Shell Social Network Playground | Test ground for social networking modules
http://socnet.shellmultimedia.com
CiviCRM - The Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector
http://civicrm.org
Modules: Community
http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/56
Modules: Organic Groups
http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/90
Community building and social networking modules
http://drupal.org/node/206724
Organic Groups modules
http://drupal.org/node/206712
Advanced Forum (module)
http://drupal.org/project/advanced_forum
OpenSocial Profile container (module)
http://drupal.org/project/opensocial-container
Organic groups (module)
http://drupal.org/project/og
Etc...
This is the biggest one I
This is the biggest one I know of - http://teamsugar.com
There's a good write up about it somewhere on drupal.org
I believe they have millions of members.
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
Yes Teamsugar is an Alexa
Yes Teamsugar is an Alexa top 5000 site in terms of Web Traffic. Here are a couple more in the top 10,000:
- http://nowpublic.com
- http://mtv.co.uk
- http://myplay.com
And of course good old http://drupal.org
So it is fair to say that Drupal can be scaled.
However don't assume that you can build big scalable sites without significant resources, no matter which tool you use. The development cycle is likely to be shorter with Drupal than RoR. Drupal performance ought to be better than RoR - check out Yahoo's Rasmus Lerdorf's keynote video at the latest Drupalcon 2008 in Szeged on this topic.
_______
Anolim: developing and supporting multimedia, community and collaboration solutions
_______
Safe Swiss Cloud: Enterprise grade cloud infrastructure for Drupal B2B solutions and platforms.
Any site...
I think any site can be made with drupal the only consern I would ever have in making drupal on large scale is security...
As been said drupal is swise army knife generally it can do any job but sometimes it be quicker to get scissors then piss trying to pull the scissors out of the knife...
Drupal is perfect to me to save time if you don't have the development know how to do some stuff... a true developer with have code libraries and built up stuff to just plug in and away you go. Obviously if your not a strong developer drupal would be your frame work... and even if you are a strong developer drupal is so versatile that I cant imagen it would be that hard to write or adapt any code libries a developer has made to fit in drupal.
I think it would be possible to build a facebook however modules would have to be developed because am pretty sure that there isnt a module for applications haha
I think the biggest hasstle with any site is designing and getting the look right... An with drupal you can start off running rather then walking... It would probable of took me another ten years to get to a standard I am at now... to be able to create a site of the capability I get with drupal. An I have only been with drupal about a year. I think next would be learning how to develop modules so that I don't have to spend hours searching for one and can create one... however this been said it maybe quicker to just find and adapt an existing module...
I think if a developer says it can't be done with drupal what there really saying is... I don't have much drupal experence and your going to have to pay me a hell of a lot more then $5k for me to mess around understanding drupal competely and then develop a module round this platform, just so its easier for you in the longrun. I recon if you got a developer with drupal experence he may even have developed stuff he keeps to himself just because a good trades man doesnt always revial his secrets else he because an unnessary or one of many in a big pond rather then the best... which will hold drupal back but at the same time... some people want there hard work to be paid for and to not be a charity.
I think the question is not can you make a myspace or a drupal but have you got the skills, to either do the work yourself or the funds to pay someone else...
Lastely whats the point in re inventing the wheel... by that I mean remaking a site like myspace or facebook is just going to be an uphill fight you wont win as they have the developers and the money to keep up to date and change... if your going to make a new site you need to be thinking more like lets make something brand new... and then work out if the best approach would be using drupal frameworks or if its not needed and you need to get a small team of developers.
The real challenge would be to make something that worked though because facebook is fallen to bloody bits haha An while back I though this looks a bit drupally and was wondering if the new site they made up was based on drupal.... But then I though it can't be because its fallen to bits haha
If I was you I would try make a 3D site where u go to next page by hovering over a link for few seconds and it twiseling round and making it more interactive where u can click on someone and talk to them etc etc... so it was like a virtual bar... and you could use drupal to even do that... The question is not can it be done its can you see how it would be done if not then I would not bother trying because chances are it will either cost you a lot or your idea will be stolen and you wont have leg to stand on :P That is unless you patent it but even then you would need a lot of money... best question is not can it be done but could I do it and if not then maybe I should try do something else.
Laters