Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.
By nick hope on
I'm planning a new site on marine life and I'm wondering if I should just code it in XHTML/CSS in Dreamweaver and add PHP bits and pieces to it, or if I should use Drupal, or another CMS.
The main website content will be hundreds (eventually thousands) of information pages for individual marine life species. Each page will have descriptions of the species, an embedded photo album of photos of that species, and many of those pages will also have an embedded online video in WMV format or similar.
The individual pages will be reached via a hierarchical structure, for example "bony fishes > moray eels > zebra moray". My plan is to make the individual pages as THE authoritative page for that particular species and for them to reach the top SERP for searches on that particular species.
Besides the info pages I want regular articles, a full-featured discussion forum, advanced search etc.. I may also want an integrated shop, or I may just pass purchasing to another sister site set up with Zencart or similar.
The site will make money by:
1. Sales of my own DVD.
2. Advertising (e.g. Google Adsense, National Geographic affiliate program etc.).
3. Possible membership fee for viewing premium videos online etc..
So is Drupal appropriate for this? If not then is there a more suitable CMS I should be looking at?
Any advice or opinions would be very gratefully received.
thanks
Comments
Pick some CMS for sure, Drupal of course is prefered
Give the number of pages I would definitly recommend using a CMS system, trying to maintain that many pages by hand would be, well trying.
I think Drupal will do everything you want though you may want to use flexinode or a custom module for the information on each species. And you can use catagories (taxonomy) to get the hierarchical structure.
This is Perfect for Drupal!
Hundreds (eventually thousands) are really too much for hand design!!
What you are going to create is a perfect site for drupal.
try image.module
try video.module
perfect for drupal taxonomy system.
everything embedded into drupal standard.
try ecommerce.module
try adsense.module
create a full right members and then enable access video.module
permission into access control page.
I think drupal can do this.
Fabio
Thanks for the replies guys.
Thanks for the replies guys. This is looking very promising indeed.
I have one rather petty concern with Drupal. If this is the bundled forum system I find it a bit simplistic. I would prefer a forum with more features such as subscriptions to topics (email notification of replies) and so on, without necessary going to the full extent of something like phpBB. Is this possible without requiring the users to sign in to a separate program?
Also I may well need six levels of classification for my content. For example:
Marine Life
>Arthropods (phylum)
> Crustaceans (class)
> Decapoda (order)
> Hippolytidae (family)
> Lysmata Amboinensis (species)
Am I right in thinking that Mambo (which I'm also considering) only supports 3 levels of classification and that Drupal would have no problem with this?
Don't know about mambo, but
Don't know about mambo, but Drupal has certainly no problem with a six level deep taxonomy.
--
Drupal services
My Drupal services
--
Drupal services
My Drupal services
There are subscription and notification modules.
Look for them here:
http://drupal.org/project/Modules
- Robert Douglass
-----
If this helped you, please take the time to rate the value of this post: http://rate.affero.net/robertDouglass/
www.hornroller.com, www.robshouse.net
Thanks Robert, those modules
Thanks Robert, those modules look like they will certainly help. I was wondering does anyone know of an example site powered by Drupal that is running a more fully-featured forum than this one (and which doesn't require a separate login for the forum)?
I'm a bit concerned about the 5 or 6 levels of classification from a search-engine-optimisation point of view.
Fishbase.org (which is great but more scientific and less "sexy" than my site will be), shows individual species at URL's such as this:
http://www.fishbase.org/summary/SpeciesSummary.cfm?id=861
That's a total nightmare from an SEO point-of-view. If I were to do this all by hand I would use a URL such as this:
"http://www.marine-life.org/sharks/grey-reef-shark.htm"
With Drupal will I be able to approach something like that simplicity and search-engine-friendliness, even if behind the scenes the page was at a deeper level?
Urls the way you want them
Turn on the path module and you can simulate the urls like your example by entering them by hand every time you create a page. For example, if you are creating the page on the grey reef shark, you could enter
sharks/grey-reef-sharkfor the path and the URL would be http://www.yoursite.com/sharks/grey-reef-shark. You can't get better SEO than that. Check out the pathauto module to see how this process can be automated.There are other, more sophisticated techniques that you can use as well in the case that you want the same page to show up with different urls. For example, using taxonomy and a couple lines of custom code in a function called conf_url_rewrite, you could have all of the following URLs point to the same page, depending on how the user comes to the page:
sharks/grey-reef-shark
fish/grey-reef-shark
big-fish/grey-reef-shark
big-fish-with-teeth/grey-reef-shark
soup-ingredients/grey-reef-shark
Basically, you can manipulate Drupal's URLs quite a bit. The example above could be generated from two different taxonomies (you can apply arbitrary taxonomies to any node, in this case the grey-reef-shark):
Vocabulary 1: Fish
Fish
-- big
----with teeth
------sharks
------other
----without teeth
------suck fish
------blow fish
-- small
....
Vocabulary 2: Cooking ingredients
vegetables
-- carrot
fruit
-- apples
meat
-- horse
-- dog
-- fish
---- grey reef shark
So the vocabularies can be used to classify your shark in non-related taxonomies, and these taxonomies can be used to manipulate URLs.
Furthermore, the taxonomies can be combined so you can get a listing of nodes on your site that are fast swimmers and are used in salads, just by manipulating the URL.
- Robert Douglass
-----
If this helped you, please take the time to rate the value of this post: http://rate.affero.net/robertDouglass/
www.hornroller.com, www.robshouse.net
What's the catch?
>> you can manipulate Drupal's URLs quite a bit
Surely there's a hit in the performance at some point.
Everything costs CPU cycles
But in this case, the underlying menu system is so well integrated into the Drupal codebase that you won't notice much on a typical site where some nodes have path aliases and some don't, or where you are doing simple string replacements in conf_url_rewrite. Even the extra database query that will be added will only take 10-20 milliseconds on most machines, so it is nothing to sweat about. Where you would run into problems is if you use the pathauto module (or otherwise assign a path to every node) and have lots of nodes (10,000 or more). This will start putting a memory burden on the server and will probably not scale to the 100,000 node area very well. That said, there is no reason things like forum topics would need paths. Usually only important content pages (like the Handbook here at Drupal.org) need paths assigned. The vast majority of the other content, like this forum topic, or the 17th photo in a series of someone being attacked by a grey reef shark, doesn't need a path assigned.
- Robert Douglass
-----
If this helped you, please take the time to rate the value of this post: http://rate.affero.net/robertDouglass/
www.hornroller.com, www.robshouse.net
So there is a limit. ;)In
So there is a limit. ;)
In my case, I do need the site to be able to scale to 100K plus pages. I would like to use URL aliases but what you've indicated is that's going to be a problem in the long run.
Robert was referring to
Robert was referring to Drupal 4.6 where a lot of aliases would be a problem. This has been changed in Drupal CVS.
--
Drupal services
My Drupal services
--
Drupal services
My Drupal services
Ah...
Got it. Thanks!
More questions on URLs and Forum
Thanks very much for the detailed reply Robert. I've got some further questions on 2 subjects:
URLs
1. Will the friendly URLs generated by the path module be seen by search engines or just by users in their address bar?
2. Will it be the friendly URL that I paste as an internal hyperlink in my pages or the long one, or will both work? (or will I simply not be pasting internal links anymore if I'm building pages with a Drupal)?
3. Will the friendly URLs show up in the taskbar (bottom left) when I hover over a link?
FORUM
I'm a bit hung up over the lack of functionality of this forum and I'm hoping I can have more features in mine. It's my biggest concern with Drupal at the moment. So...
1. Can I have a button to directly post in the forum, not forcing me to preview first? i.e. I want "post" and "preview" buttons together.
2. Can I have a "quote" button in the windows showing previous posts so I can quote someone's post in my reply.
3. Does the notify module integrate into the forum? For instance can I have a checkboxes for "email notification of replies to this thread" as I'm posting my reply?
4. Can I post pictures in the forum with [img][/img] tags?
5. Can I define bold and italic text with [b][/b] or [i][/i] etc.?
6. Can I configure the forum to show the whole thread as I'm replying, not just the post I'm replying to?
7. If I can't have this stuff, can a more fully-featured forum be integrated with Drupal, sharing the same user database so a dual login would not be needed?
URLs
URLs
Search engines will see them.
Both will work. You will be pasting fewer internal links using Drupal, but you might always want to refer to another page from within a text, and in those cases you would use either the clean URL or the traditional (Drupal-specific) node/nid notation.
You will see the friendly URL. You can test this by hovering over the Handbooks link at the top of this page.
Yes. This is a configuration option.
There is functionality that does this in the contributions repository. Look for quote or something like that on the modules download page.
I'd have to refresh my memory on that question. I'm pretty sure you can subscribe to forums with the subscriptions module. Notify simply notifies you of all updated content, afaik. You might want to check out the CivicSpaceLabs.org distribution. It is a pure-Drupal distro that packages lots of modules together in a ready-to-use manner. The current release integrates the forums and PHPList so that the forums double as a mailing list. Very practical.
There are lots of ways to post images in nodes in general. My favorite is the image.module/img_assist.module combination. Look at the modules download page for these. There is also support for several types of non-html markup and three different WYSIWYG editors to choose from.
see previous.
I don't think so.
Yes, but you will probably decide it isn't worth it. When configured the right way, with all the bells and whistles that can be found on the downloads page, you will probably be satisfied with Drupal forums. The implementation here at Drupal.org is minimal by design.
That said, there are some limitations to the forums that are hard to overcome. If you want a moderator per forum, you're out of luck (only global moderators can be created). If you want private forums you have to rely on access modules like the Organic Groups module. As good as some of these are, they never fully replace a system where access control is built into the forum mechanism itself. If you don't need private forums, though, this is a non-issue.
- Robert Douglass
-----
If this helped you, please take the time to rate the value of this post: http://rate.affero.net/robertDouglass/
www.hornroller.com, www.robshouse.net
Forum answers
Here's a few more answers to your questions about what forums can be made to do in Drupal:
The image filter module lets you insert (thumbnail, variable-size, or full-size) pictures into a forum topic, in the form [image:nid]. However, the image already needs to exist as a node on your site.
For integrated uploading and inserting of images, use img_assist.
I don't think image filter lets you use [img][/img] tags, but I'm using an old version - it could have been updated since I installed it.
This kind of formatting is called BBCode, and is available using the BBCode formatting bar module. Haven't tried it, but check it out.
Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh
Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh