Drupal vs Joomla vs Xoops for my site
I'm building a product support site for my company. I've built 10+ sites with Joomla but have just started playing around with Drupal and Xoops. I'm trying to decide between those 3 on what would be best for this site.
Joomla's lack of group level access controls is what made me go to Drupal. However, I'm not sure Drupal can do everything I want.
Here's what I'm looking for, and in parenthesis, which platform I think has the edge. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
- User groups: We have 4 products and many groups of users (Access to Prod A only; access to prod B and C only; access to prod A, C, D; etc). (Drupal; although the JUGA mod for Joomla will work).
- Downloads: Software downloads, manual downloads... all based on group level access. Also the ability to group downloads and for admins to easily upload them. (Joomla with JUGA?)
- LMS / e-learning - ability to assign learning content to users or more importantly, assign quizzes that prove they understand the material. User could submit the quiz answers which could go in their record or to a DB that provides reports. (Joomla has the JoomlaLMS addon)
- Calendar - ability to display upcoming events and training courses, and for users to sign up for courses. (Joomla)
- Users sign up to training classes - signup only allows for x attendees and will block attendance when it is full. (Joomla)
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Jeff
OG?
I think the Organic Groups Drupal module might be used to set up your groups. It should also be able to provide group based access to downloads.
There are a couple calendar options.
Penn State is working on eLearning using Drupal -> http://elearning.psu.edu/drupalineducation/
Others will probably have more suggestions...
Eric
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The Formula 1 Modeling Website
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-groups: definitely
-groups: definitely http://drupal.org/project/og. Also check out http://drupal.org/project/og_user_roles and http://drupal.org/project/og_subgroups
-downloads: easily done with a content type for "download", cck fields for meta data, and filefield for the files themselves. I'd probably also add taxonomy_image to give files a nice icon. You also might want to look at the fileframework, dbfm, and webfm, modules.
-LMS: take a look at the quiz and/or webform modules. For reports take a look at the webform_reports and views modules.
-Calendar: at this point I would probably go with the date/calendar modules, but there is also an event module.
-User sign up limits: check out the rules module. You could set up a rule to check the number of submissions each time a new sign up is completed, then disallow that signup in the future.
I spent some time with joomla before turning to drupal. If joomla does what you want out of the box, you'd probably get the site up and running faster with joomla. Drupal is much more of a framework for building complex sites than it is an out-of-box solution. HOWEVER, the second you want to tweak functionality in any way drupal gets the edge.
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"God helps those who help themselves." - Ben Franklin
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Thanks for the quick
Thanks for the quick replies.
The problem I have with Joomla is that the current version (1.5) does not allow for this type of group access I want. There is a pay module I can get to allow this called JUGA. However, version 1.6 is supposed to incorporate better user group access and maybe make JUGA obsolete.
I need the site now though so I can't wait for 1.6. I'd hate to do this in 1.5 and then have to completely revamp the user module and sign everyone up when I upgrade to 1.6.
I'll test out those modules you've suggested.
Thanks!
You just reminded me of
You just reminded me of another difference between joomla and drupal-- you'll almost never have to pay for a drupal module (though you may opt to pay a developer to adapt and/or upgrade them to your needs). The drupal economy is, for the most part, based around services not code. I'm constantly amazed at the incredible amount of code available for free (as in beer) on drupal.org-- views, panels, og, nodequeue, etc. Truly amazing.
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"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." - Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." - Ben Franklin
"Search is your best friend." - Worldfallz
I guess nobody likes to
I guess nobody likes to spend a lot of time learning a new cms if they can do the same thing with the one they already know.
I would always look at how to do it in Drupal instead of another CMS, simply because I'm sure I'll spend less time researching a solution with Drupal than learning another CMS and finding a way to do what I want.
If you've been attracted to joomla in the past you've made a mistake, but I can understand why, because the administrative section is fancier to the eye than drupal's and so it's easy to think that joomla is better, but many awards and big sites have chosen drupal over joomla, so if you're really asking yourself at this moment about changing, maybe you can invest the time to learn drupal and find a way to achieve your project and forget about joomla quickly, only using it when clients request it, you'll have a double skill.
Good luck whatever the solution you choose.
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