By Gus-F2C on

I run a website for a Supporters Group, and have had the site running using a number of different scripts in the past including Joomla, Dolphin and am currently using Elgg.

I am looking to give the site some of the functionalities of Social Networking, so that members can add one another as friends, upload media, and markup attendance of sitewide events as well as an integrated forum. There are other functions that I would like to implement, but these are the main ones.

Joomla fulfilled its purpose for a while, and as has been mentioned on a couple of topics on this site, soon becomes very static and the networking between members appears basic, even with Community Builder installed.

Dolphin lasted all of three weeks, and is very weak on the security front, and appeared to be to many Boonex referred back end scripts for my liking.

I have been running with Elgg for about 2 months, and although it does everything that I want it to do - it present a professional, sleek website and some of its functionality is very 'boys own stuff'.

Therefore, am after some advice on the benifits of Drupal, and whether or not I will be able to acheive my main four objectives.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Gus

Comments

dnaromance’s picture

dnaromance commented

Hi,

I scanned through your requirement, I think Drupal has no problem to achieve what you want, likes forum, add user as friends, upload media, my doubt is just site wide event. So far, I've haven't try any event related module, but for other, I've tried it.

To add as friend, there are many, likes Buddy, OG, and other.

Drupal has its own forum module integrated.

There are also many module allow upload media, such as embed media, filefield and other.

I think first thing to do is download Drupal and install it on your test, try out whether the core modules suit you, and spend some times check out the modules you need are in which version, then select a version.

I can help :)

Gus-F2C’s picture

Gus-F2C commented

Many thanks for the response kailoon

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

Drupal can handle everything you need rather easily. For some examples of the many sites built with drupal see:

Drupal has a learning curve, but if you don't get discouraged and stick with it, you'll never need to learn another framework. I too used joomla with community builder (nothing more than user profiles really) and was thoroughly frustrated and unimpressed. Drupal was like a breath of fresh air. There's basically nothing you can't do with drupal if you're willing to dig in and get your hands dirty occassionally (though the 4k+ contributed modules usually make that unnecessary).

Some of the modules you'll want to look at:

Don't be overwhelmed by the number of modules-- drupal is far more modular than other CMSs-- which allows you to pick and choose only what you need, unlike monolithic modules like community builder which lock you into one particular implementation of a boatload of features.

Gus-F2C’s picture

Gus-F2C commented

WorldFallz thank you very much for your time and trouble and pointing me in the right direction where the modules are concerned.