By BleedingEdge on

Hi guys,

I started creating a website in Joomla, but have come across several issues. I have been looking at Drupal and checking the forums, and it seems that it may do the trick in my case.

My main requirement is the ability to create custom content types and templates for certain categories (and also the ability to creating custom category layouts for categories as well). Is this possible in Drupal (along with the CCK plugin)?

I am a very experienced HTML/CSS developer and reasonably experienced with PHP.

Many thanks,

Martin

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

marcvangend’s picture

marcvangend
he/him
Primary language Dutch
Location Amsterdam
commented

Hi Martin, welcome to the community.
Creating custom content types is very easy in Drupal, like you say using the CCK module.
You can categorize all content using the taxonomy module (shipped with the drupal core).
The drupal theme system allows you to write preprocess functions. In such a preprocess function, you can evaluate all variables of the current page view and tell Drupal which page and/or node template to use. (see http://drupal.org/node/223440)

BleedingEdge’s picture

BleedingEdge commented

Thaks marcvangend!

Can the CCK be considered "stable" for production use?

And I believe that you can have multiple nested categories in Drupal. Is that correct? So each category can have its own template page?

I have just bought the Drupal, PHPBB, and Wordpress book, and will be reading it over the next couple of days, but in the meantime, can I ask if it is reasonably simple to integrate PHPBB and WordPress with Drupal? It is very hard with Joomla (even using the JFusion plugin).

Thanks very much! I look forward to learning more about Drupal :)

Martin

gareth_w’s picture

gareth_w commented

Views. Views is the flip side of CCK if you will - it's not freindly to newcomers but immensely powerful. With that and CCK You should be able to do pretty much anything. I migrated the main site I ran from Joomla to Drupal and while it was a steep learning curve I've never regretted it at all. Can't think of any reason to ever go back to Joomla either. Also lookat Contemplate - I like this module and have used it a lot to create listings in the past.

I believe PhpBB integration with Drupal is possible - but your using Drupal forums here and they work fine. There are a few modules around to pretty them up and unless you already have a massive PhpBB database to integrate or expect a massive forum-literate community (who would not like change) then I would at least try the defaults. There is an organic group for Drupal Forum developement and I suggest you read this up to give you a better idea of what's possible.

As for wordpress, I can't think for a moment why you'd want to integrate that with Drupal (convert to maybe) as they do very much the same thing - I have no idea if this is possible.

Hope this helps

marcvangend’s picture

marcvangend
he/him
Primary language Dutch
Location Amsterdam
commented

CCK is definately stable. I can't think of a Drupal site that doesn't use CCK, in fact, parts of CCK will move into core when Drupal 7 arrives.

With the preprocess functions, you can link every category to it's own node template. Another approach (really nice when the templates don't differ too much from each other) would be to add a class to the body tag (like class="category-1") and do it all in css:

body.category-1 #content {
  background-color: #F00;
}
body.category-2 #content {
  background-color: #0F0;
}
styro’s picture

styro commented

That book is waay out of date - eg for Drupal 4.7 at the latest (possibly even earlier).

There are a lot of new books out now though :)

IMO Drupal is more of a complete do-it-all solution, and trying to integrate it with phpbb or wordpress is asking for headaches.

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

Please don't post duplicate threads. I deleted the dupe, thanks.

As to your question, if you search this site with "joomla" you'll find some good info on people who made the switch from joomla to drupal. I'm one of them-- i made the switch and i'll never look back!