New to Drupal hesitating with ez Publish : some questions after my first install

anrikun - December 30, 2008 - 09:11

Hi,

I have to build a rather complicated site and I still hesitate between Drupal 6 and ez Publish 4 to do it.
I heard that Drupal is easer to extend so I want to give it a try, but if there are people who can tell me about their experience with Drupal and ez Publish, I would be glad to hear it.

After my first install of Drupal 6, I have several questions about it:
- There's no sample site I could learn from. How can I install one?
- From admin, you have to open a lot of menus before you reach the content list. Is there a way to customize this?
- All the content is listed in the same table, with no tree. It's strange that content is not hierarchicaly organised. Am I missing something?
- Can Drupal handle differents contents for anonymous users and for suscribers. I mean, on my site, users should have the ability to suscribe to paid content. Is this possible? Can Drupal handle Paypal?

Thank you in advance for your help!
Sorry for my bad English.

Hmfireball

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Drupal vs ez-publish

FanisTsiros - December 30, 2008 - 11:34

I 'm also new to drupal world. I have "passed through" joomla, typo3 and ez-publish cms's for a long time testing and learning. I used to love ez-publish until i have found drupal cms. My opinion is that drupal is powerfull as ez-publish (and much more) but it is having a steep learning curve (ez-publish is much more difficult to understand manage and administer). So you have to spend some time reading handbooks, installing modules, watch the forums to understand drupal philosophy.

In my opinion there's nothing like drupal (at the moment) in the open source cms field.

To your questions:

1) No there's no sample site (like ez-publish) to test. I think this is a better aproach as looking to managed already publish content is difficult to understand the "why and how". Stay in drupal. You create YOUR sample content and go on.

2) No in my opinion admin menus in drupal are the most easy to use. Once you are familiar with the menu system you will be 5 to 10 times faster to administer than in ez-publish. Drupal is much faster. You can also use a lot of modules to administer drupal. For example see http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu_dropdown

3) Yes content is not organised like you think in db table. But this is for flexibility. You can use taxonomy to organize and promote your content exactly as you like. Taxonomy system used in drupal is the most powerfull (and simple i think) to classify your content. There are aslo a lot of modules for categorising content.

4) Yes drupal can handle different user accounts. And i think (i'm not sure) can also handle Paypal (Search for modules in search downloads link)

Conclusion (ok my conclusion;-) is that drupal is much better than ez-publish. The key differnce is that there is a huge community here to help (and maintain) this wonderfull cms (and not only cms) as i use drupal not only for web but also for LAN aplication to store data tasks and so on.

Edit: Sorry the above right link to administration menu module is http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu

ReliabilityConsistencyFeedback ------ NeverAchievable -------

Thanks a lot for your answer

anrikun - December 30, 2008 - 13:04

Thanks a lot for taking time to answer all my questions FanisTsiros.
I'm happy to see that there's a real community ready to help beginners to Drupal like me :-)
I will search in modules list to find what I need. I hope most of them are compatible with Drupal 6 as Drupal 5 still seems to be the most used version.
Thanks again!

Hmfireball

Using Drupal for other tasks than standard CMS

anrikun - January 10, 2009 - 11:45

Hi again,

As you wrote you use Drupal for other tasks, do you think I can use it like some kind of CRM:
I need to store professional contacts and a list of books so that:
- site users can search for a contact based on his name or his job
- site users can search for a book based on its title or subject
- contacts can update their information
I was planning to store these contacts & books and manage them with a different software like Sugar CRM.
Do you know if Drupal can be used to do this too?
Are there any examples.

Thanks again.
Hmfireball

You don't need SugarCRM

guidot - January 20, 2009 - 02:50

We use SugarCRM at our company but it does not fit our needs very well, so I I'm now in the process of implementing what we need with drupal.

For the things you want to do there's no doubt you can do all that with drupal. You'll want to use

Drupal 6, it has lots of advantages in functionality and user interface over D5. The most important modules are already ported and have as well made substantial progress. You won't look back.
the built-in profile module to to define your contacts as site users. That way they may login and edit their information themselves.
CCK for building a content type that represents a book with title, author name, publisher, title image and so on.
Views to create lists of contacts and books and the built-in search or one of the many search modules for searching content.
drupalmodules.com to find your way through the many modules.

Have a look at the case studies to learn what other people have done with Drupal (and how they did that). I also recommend buying a good book, for instance "Using Drupal", written by some of the top drupal developers.

_

WorldFallz - January 20, 2009 - 02:59

Regarding the 'sample' site-- you can install the http://drupal.org/project/devel module which has the ability to auto generate any number of users and content much like a sample site.

_{===

"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}

Thanks so much for your

anrikun - January 22, 2009 - 12:50

Thanks so much for your help!
Guidot, if you don't mind, I might ask you a few more questions when I start building my CRM like pages :-)