By John White on

Greetings,

I am investigating CMS systems and I came across Drupal. I have used other systems, most recently TYPO3 (see www.judonyc.com). I want to know if Drupal will satisfy my requirements:

  1. A set of related sites for different chess clubs under an umbrella site.
  2. Support for content based on user (login) and group (which club the user belongs to). The front page, public, would have common announcements etc.
  3. Ease of administration. The site will be administered (mostly) by one or two smart, non-technical people.
  4. User tracking. Users, mostly kids, will try different chess exercises, and we want to track their progress to suggest new exercises.
  5. An easy way to integrate an online chess board. This last requirement is admittedly ridiculous. There are excellent chess sites out there, with dedicated support staff. As such, it can be dropped. I am curious about the response.
  6. Performance/Scalability. Typically, kids login only in the evenings - after they have done their homework. So I will need something that will support about 100 concurrent users (admittedly an optimistic guess). I looked at the performance numbers posted on this forum, but they didn't really tell me much (how many concurrent users, server setup etc, saturation point etc.). Has anyone benchmarked Drupal against a similar site using a different CMS? For example, anecdotal evidence suggests that Mambo or Joomla do not perform well under load, and would be unsuitable for my needs.
  7. Learning curve. Any powerful tool requires a hefty investment in learning before its power is realized. My uninformed guess is that I would have to become proficient in Javascript and PHP to use Drupal effectively. Is XSL also a requirement?

Other folks have asked me to build similar for their sport activities. I think I can do most of this with Typo3, but I agree with the posts on this forum, that while powerful, Typo3 is pretty complicated, and hard to develop (though easy to administer, and very reliable). What is the learning curve like for Drupal?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you might have. I hope that I have posted in the appropriate forum. I apologize to the community if I have not.

John

Comments

Bertrand_Lefort’s picture

Bertrand_Lefort commented

Hello,

I use Drupal from few weeks now, I am not the right person to answer your questions, this is a beginner point of view.

---1. A set of related sites for different chess clubs under an umbrella site.

If I understand what you mean, it is easy to build multisites with Drupal, As long has they have different domain adress.

See http://drupal.org/node/20650

You can also build a multi site if you have a single theme.
Blocks (Parts that contains menu) are very easy to configure and easy to make them visible where you want to. You just have to configure the path you want them appear.

2. Support for content based on user (login) and group (which club the user belongs to). The front page, public, would have common announcements etc.

Yes and easy. There is a module to customize the contact forms the way you want.

3. Ease of administration. The site will be administered (mostly) by one or two smart, non-technical people.

Yes, I think it one of the best of Drupal. Adding content is very easy and not more complicated than asking a question or posting a comment.You can add WYSIWYG javascript editor like TinyMCE (see module section). I would not recommend it, I prefer to teach a little bit of HTML by e-mail, but it works great.

4. User tracking. Users, mostly kids, will try different chess exercises, and we want to track their progress to suggest new exercises.

User tracking : yes but I have never seen chess modules

5. An easy way to integrate an online chess board. This last requirement is admittedly ridiculous. There are excellent chess sites out there, with dedicated support staff. As such, it can be dropped. I am curious about the response.

no idea. There is a lot of people who are abble to integrate any code like phpbb (forum), gallery 2 (for image)...

6. Performance/Scalability. Typically, kids login only in the evenings - after they have done their homework. So I will need something that will support about 100 concurrent users (admittedly an optimistic guess). I looked at the performance numbers posted on this forum, but they didn't really tell me much (how many concurrent users, server setup etc, saturation point etc.). Has anyone benchmarked Drupal against a similar site using a different CMS? For example, anecdotal evidence suggests that Mambo or Joomla do not perform well under load, and would be unsuitable for my needs.

Mambo has no cache support If i remember. There are a couple of discussion in Drupal Web site, peoples have done those measurment. Drupal has cache support and seems to be very fast. I think taht there are to many parameters to answer the question. Have you got dedicaced server or not ? What version of MySQl are you using (there are now memory tables and triggers in mysql 5) ? I think that Drupal can be easely tune. Spreadfirefox is using drupal and has many visitors . See http://drupal.org/node/16738
but there are a lot more on Drupal Web Site.

7. Learning curve. Any powerful tool requires a hefty investment in learning before its power is realized. My uninformed guess is that I would have to become proficient in Javascript and PHP to use Drupal effectively. Is XSL also a requirement?

XSL : I think no.

I think that in few hours you wil be abble to do a lot of things. There is a tutorial in the Web Site to explain how to make module, it could be usefull (see handbook). It is easy to implement new features and easy to share them. PHP is a very well documented language, very easy to learn.

My personnal impression is very good. It is certainly not as powerfull than Plone or typo3, but it is fast to developp, easy to maintain. Is is very good if you want people to make exchange on the Web site,.

My major problem in Drupal is multilingual support. Jose A Reyero has done a good job with internationalisation module but it requires patch in the core module and it does not allow any content to be translated. Some modules are not compatible due to the patch. Core development team does not seem to be interested in this feature. Drupal development is volunteer and "is not democratic" as you can read in some Drupal pages.
Note that installation require knowledge in Mysql and in patching file, but there are a lot of tutorial for that.

Support could be difficult, because answer is a volunteer job.

Hope it helps and sorry for my english

Bertrand

John White’s picture

John White commented

Bertrand,

Thank you for your comments. They are very helpful indeed. Vous parlez tres bien anglais. Vous avez bien compris mes questions.

A bientot

John