BeachSalesRealEstate.com from Joomla 1.5 to Drupal 6

 

Joomla 1.5 site:
Beach Sales Real Estate 2

Drupal 6 rebuild (beta):
Beach Sales Real Estate 3 (beta)

 

So we originally hired a local company to build our real
estate website on their proprietary content management system. They sucked AND
it was a disaster CMS. So we crammed and self-crash coursed open source CMSs.
Joomla and Drupal were the winners. At the time (April 2008) Joomla was the
better more stable and better supported choice at the time.

 

That version of the site can be seen here,

http://www.beachsales.com/realestate
. It was built on Joomla 1.5 with the
Community Builder extension and the Ads Manager extension, which meshed well but
customization was an absolute pain for our novice skills AND SEO was abysmal
because of the urls generated by Joomla core and the integration of the
extensions.

 

We had build numerous other sites in Drupal and feel in
love with the platform. We had tried to do a rebuild in Drupal a couple of
months later (around June) but CCK for Druapl 6 was still not bug free enough to
bother with (check box problems, etc.).

 

Finally, CCK was to a point where we felt we could use it
and trust it. We rebuilt it and are testing now, having moved over some
properties and user accounts from the other site (which we have let go a bit in
anticipation of rebuilding, i.e. little marketing and promotion).

 

Overall we are pleased with the performance of CCK. We have
plenty of stylistic things to tackle but functionally it is pretty close.

 

Feedback and questions are appreciated and welcome.

 

Non-Core Modules 

CCK

Friend

Avatar Blocks (utilizing ImageCache and ImageAPI)

Img

Forward

Lightbox2

Pathauto (utilizing Token)

Captcha (not yet activated)

Tagadelic (used for browsing blocks). 

 

Theme

This is the Roople Theme, Tapestry. (We have obviously more
refining to do on the theme and formatting).

 

Ad Serving

Some ads are being served from an installation of OpenX
(formerly OpenAds) and some using Google Adsense. These are not being run off of
a module they are just the code placed in blocks.

Comments

demian dellinger’s picture

Quite a few folks saw the post and went to the site. But no comments? Is no one familiar enough with Joomla to comment?

Would love to hear about other experiences converting from Joomla 1.5 to Drupal 6.x or visa versa.

mrbert’s picture

For your site to be a showcase, you need to provide a breakdown of the design and project details such as screenshots, then you'd have everyone comment on it.

Ghana Real Estate | Yohimbe Bark | Shea Butter

socialtalker’s picture

far more professional looking, a little better organized.
i like the use of the dark brown header and blue grey footer. i also like when the footer is put to use as a menu block.

adminkarl’s picture

I think the Drupal site has a more professional look to it,compared to the Joomla site. This is more then likely due to you designing and inputing content rather then a web designer. The colors have more of a stronger contrast also. It is difficult designing a Real Estate site. I find them all the same. Seems there is a mentality that every property site must have no imagination applied to it. Your office video/picture shows your office has fun, bringing a strong human element to it. This is original to Real Estate design.

I downloaded Drupal just yesterday and it will be my first CMS attempt. I will be designing two sites specifically, my own Real Estate site, and my office site. Still learning what Drupal can do.

demian dellinger’s picture

How are your first Drupal attempts going?

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