Hello. I am evaluating OpenSource CMSes for an online journal website I
am creating for a community of non-tech professionals, field staff, and
scientists. The website will primarily carry newslike reports and info, with
commenting, and also some static pages about the group, etc. I am looking
at Drupal and Xaraya for my requirements. They seem to be similar, and I
got some info from reading documentation of both and the comparison
at cmsmatrix.org.
But on some features important to me, I'm not able to tell. Does Drupal
support all of these?
1. Nested categories (sub category with category)
2. CSS stylesheet support
3. Restricted access for certain areas/stories of the journal site only
to registered uses (So some articles are not public others are.)
4. Restiction for comments on articles only to registered users.
5. User groups and assigining privileges to groups, not users.
6. Capture more details during registration of users in addition
to name and email address, like country/city/address (optional
inputs)
Aside from this if there's any other advice the experts here can give
on comparing Xaraya with Drupal, that will be a great help. (Any strong
pluses or minuses of Drupal.)
Comments
All of thoses are supported
All of thoses are supported in drupal. I know absolutely nothing about Xaraya though!
Mostly yes
Xaraya is great, or will be when it reaches an official release. I've installed and run both. One key difference is the resource requirements. Xaraya has a more rigorous architecture than Drupal, but is a resource hog. That said, when you get in to look at the code, some parts of Xaraya (last I looked, about six months ago) were still legacy PHPNuke code.
My feeling is that Xaraya is sort of a platform that will always be resource intensive and probably get more so, but will have great capabilities and stability once it has an official release and a few bug fixes. Drupal is currently lighter, smaller, faster, very stable and reliabel and I think it will stay that way in all respects because those are Drupal priorities.
Now as for the specifcs you ask
1. Yes
2. Yes
3. I think people do it using the Taxonomy Access Control module, but I haven't tried it.
4. Yes
5. Yes
6. I don't know. I'd bet it's either built-in or there's a module, but that's just a guess.
Sorry, but this is a
Sorry, but this is a completely untrue statement. Xaraya doesn't have any legacy code from any *Nuke derivative. The codebase started at .8 from PostNuke (which was later scrapped by the current PostNuke developers) as a complete rewrite of the code base. So, 2 years ago, 6 months ago or today, still an untrue statement;)
As far as resource intensive statements through out these comments, yes, Xaraya is more resource intensive on initial page load. The reason varies from our templating system to everything that is handled in the in the core. However, what isn't mentioned on any of these comments is the cache system which takes place on the very next page load dramatically cuts the resources needed to render.
Anywho, doesn't matter to me which you use. Xaraya will handle whatever, so will Drupal by the looks of it. It's a GPL project so I don't think anyone will get any richer one way or the other;)
John Cox
http://wyome.com
Very true.
Thanks for the post! It's a bit disheartening to hear the 'X sucks/Y Rocks/Z is better than A/etc' stuff that floats around so much. I'm absolutely a Drupal partisan, but the OSS community certainly has room for a huge number of tools with different strengths, focuses, and all that. :) Accurate information is essential.
--
Jeff Eaton | Click Here To Find Out Why Drupal "Sucks"
--
Eaton — Partner at Autogram
The things you mentioned are
The things you mentioned are not core functionality in drupal! This means that you have to upload additional modules and eventually twiddle a bit. Drupal does not do this out-of-the-box. If you want it all ready to use, keep with Xaraya or Nuke.
more accurately
If I am reading the original poster correctly, the only thing which is not in core that is being requested is (3). The poster will need to use one of the permissions modules to implement it.
Installing Drupal modules is
Installing Drupal modules is about as easy as it can be. Personally, the fact that there is not a lot of junk built in to the Drupal core is what appealed to me in the first place.
If you know how to FTP files from one computer to a server, this should be seen as a plus for Drupal, not a minus.
Xaraya, by the way is also quite modular and many modules can also be added or disabled as required so, again, I wouldn't make my decision based on that consideration either. I do think that Xaraya core is more resource intensive though, even when stripped.
After trying a wide range of
After trying a wide range of CMS-s for a wide range of clients, I noticed the following simple thing: measure a code in Megabytes. This should give you a good aproximation for the system's complexity, and complexity usually means more need for resources, and addition of more complex functions.
About the topc: (I've used Xaraya for commercial sites, and programmed some custom modules):
Xaraya is not for a simple online journal: its main strength is the integrated "Dynamic Data" module, which is a short name for a dynamic database structure: you define objects with attributes (for example an Article object with attributes Title, Author, PubTime, Teaser, Thumbnail, MainText, Credits,...), and edit these objects, create templates to display them, create validation scripts for specific data, ...
The main advantage is the modular approach of this that you can for example add any time a W3CMatchingRFC field to an Article object, and then write a validation script quickly to pull the matching RFC from W3C, and grab the important data out of it. Or add a link attribute to a CSSElementHelp object located in the CSS Help section of your site, and display some attributes of the CSSHelp in the article dynamically.
This may sound stupid, but xaraya acts like a HUGE lego set of tools to build a CUSTOM website.
Xaraya is like Typo3 in its resource needs, in its flexibility and in it's target audience. You HAVE to have a good vision of programming sense to customize it, and if you don't customize it, it's just a resource heavy hog on chains, like a huge Viking warrior in a small cage.
Drupal is right in the middle of the CMS game: definatly not for simple blogs. Perfect for a small-to-medium community sites, has many pre-built modules, runs very fast.
If you look at the codes, you'll see more differences: Xaraya is modular, a bit too modular, which makes expansion easier (for example creating custom function for a module is just create a new file with a pre-defined name structure, place it in the modules dir, and call from anywhere with a system wrapper function -> 5 min.) at the price of power.
IMHO Drupal's core is lightweight, and balzing fast. Not so modular.
If this long piece of text confused you even more, let me summarise my opinion:
I would suggest Drupal for you. Xaraya is just too big for a journal site.
For your 6 questions: Xaraya can handle these.
Since my knowledge about Drupal is very-very limited compared to the site's forum users, I leave the Drupal-related side to the experts :)
That's more or less what I
That's more or less what I was trying to say when I said to think of Xaraya as a platform. Thanks for saying it better Ashita!
Xaraya it is very complex.
Xaraya it is very complex. When I look at its code that it would be desirable to throw out superfluous.
Drupal it is much more beautiful codes.
It was good to embody ideas Xaraya in Drupal.
I don't think that's fair to
I don't think that's fair to say. Xaraya has a wee little bit of legacy Nuke code in it, but from other perspectives, Xaraya is more sophisticated, modular code than Drupal. Xaraya is edging it's way towards code of the complexity and stability of Gallery.
I don't know anything in the PHP CMS/Forum/Blog category that touches Gallery for being intelligently coded, but Xaraya is going that way. Both of them, however, are resource-intensive.
That's not wrong and it is beautiful in its own way, it just isn't necessary for what most small site-builders want.
thanks, and supplementary questions
Many thanks to each person who posted a note. I've gained a better sense of the distinctions.
I am able to tick my checklist that at some of the features I want are supported in Drupal. But there are still some questions, so I decided I will show my primary workflow here and it will help if someone can tell me when Drupal will handle it for me.
When a report or story is posted by a logged in member:
a) The editor (a designated user) needs to get a notification that a new article came in. (I saw something about notifications, so I assume Drupal can notify. Please correct me if I am wrong!)
b) at the time of editing/review/approval the editor will flag it as public or private (in some way that the system allows), in addition to categorising it into topic+region (this is why I asked for nested categories, which people say is possible in Drupal.)
c) Once the story/report gets into the system, it needs to get listed in the main page and relevant category pages. I assume this much all journal type CMSes will do. But anonymous users must be able to see it ONLY IF the report/article itself has been marked public. Otherwise, I only want a users group that has relevant permissions to see it. This is critical to my whole choice of a CMS.
I looked over the modules list but could not find a permissions module (one of you referred to it) to address the feature where I want anonymous visitors can be restricted to some content, which registered members will have access to.
ALSO - I want the granularity of restriction to be per article or node, as Drupal folks seem to call it. Will I be able do that as well?
Appreciate the advice.
Modules avialable
Hi,
If you want to mark public basing on node level go for node privacy by role module.
If you wnat to mark public basing on categeory then taxanomy access module.
Another module simple access module exists, i haven't treid and i don't have any ideas on it.
Sunny
www.gleez.com
No problem.
a: We use Drupal this way all the time for our stories
b: Inherent to Drupal. No problem
c: Again, this is no problem. Drupal allows for multilevel group permissions so ony those people with (or without) permissions can see the story. There is a lot of flexibility here.
Permissions and groups are handled in the Access Control Module. One of the very nice things you can do with Drupal is "clone" document types. As an example, we "cloned" the story type to be a press release type (see here for more information; http://drupal.org/node/35686). Node (or document) types can have their own permission scheme. You can have as much (or as little) granularity as you want.
Hope this helps.
Alright; that helps. Thanks.
Alright; that helps. Thanks.
I have tried Xaraya and
I have tried Xaraya and Typo3, and it's so hard to use than Drupal.
I have tried Exponent, and it's easy to use, but it lacks modules, and some part of it like the top links cannot be changed.
I have tried Joomla! but I'm stuck with it, can't remember why I quit using it, but I think because It's hard to customize the way I like it to look like, and modules are great, but not as useful as Drupal modules.
Now I'm using Drupal, I'm happy with it. Check out this drupal-based site, www.yaw-yan.com