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By SweedyMick on
Hi,
I just started to get interested in Content Management Systems and it seems that Drupal caught my eyes among the various ones :)
I'm still not sure to choose the CMS, and I'd like your advice because I'm still very new to them, as I know very well PHP and have always developed web sites with Frameworks (Zend Framework and Symfony).
So here is the context : I developed a web site for a radio more than 4 years ago, the PHP code is getting very old, a lot of people added small pieces of code everywhere, and now the web site is not extensible at all and dirty.
So now the idea is to make the web site from scratch and have something clean and which will remain so with time.
As I have a strong experience with PHP Frameworks and the MVC architecture, I still have some "worries" about using Drupal.
I saw I can have access to the database in pages, but is it possible to use instead PHP objects, just like models do in MVC. As a radio, there is a data about artists for example on most pages, and I don't want to do something like SELECT myCols FROM artists JOIN myOtherTables on every page. I prefer much more something like Artists::search(array(myCriteria)) and get Artist objects that I can easily handle.
This is my most important question : can I deal with PHP objects in my pages ? Especially because I hope the website will grow in some way as a community website, so I need a strong object relational model.
Is it easy to integrate complex dynamic forms with Ajax calls and other JavaScript stuff (using jQuery by the way) ?
And is it easy to make complex layouts inside some pages (I don't talk about the general layout, just the ones for some pages, using additional stylesheets for positioning blocks) ? With my usual frameworks that's ok because I write the view (ie. XHTML page) I want.
Thank you for your help, and I hope your answers will make me switch to Drupal :)
Comments
Custom module
Hi
I would import your data directly into drupal as nodes (content types) and then you can customize the view with the "views" (and / or "panels") module. Furthermore you could either define your content types as own modules (which I would strongly suggest) or you could use the CCK module.
For an example how such a site could be implemented, have a look at MyPlay from SonyBMG (http://drupal.org/node/241344).
Regards, Luca
Thank you, the example you
Thank you, the example you gave me is really close to the kind of web site I intended to develop, so it shows me that Drupal can be used for my needs!
As the approach seems to be very different to what I'm used to with frameworks like Symfony, I still have no idea how all this can be implemented, but I think the tutorials and books will help!