By HateSpitLove on

I am considering taking a dive into Drupal. I have tried a plethora of content management systems but am still not finding exactly what I am looking for.

If anyone can answer these questions it would be greatly appreciated in that I don't want to waste my time if the following features are either non-existent or difficult to utilize.

Does/can Drupal...

1. Archive journals or articles by month as opposed to itemized topic listings?
2. Include a working gallery based upon GD version 1?
3. Include a forum that supports email notification?
4. Allow multiple journal/article categories to be viewed and categorized SEPARATELY? In other words, can I link to say...a journal about technology and view strictly the technology content then have a personal journal and view the content strictly by the content of that journal (archiving included) as opposed to all entries indexing on one page?
5. Can article submission be limited to just me without contributary content options being viewed by users who create a login to access password protected content such as the forum?

Idealistically, I am looking for a journalized content management system that will allow me to support somewhere in the neighborhood of six ongoing categories with comment capability but won't mix them all together and has a good archiving technique.

I have reviewed the features, but some of the details are unclear and are issues that have arisen with some of the other content management systems that I have tried. Most are either too multiuser based or don't include all of the features that I am looking for in an overall website (typical blog systems that lack gallery and forum features). I am currently mixing and matching content (b2/wordpress with phpbb w/ gallery and calendar plugins, etc. etc.). When it comes to implementing the design aspect of the site I am looking at a lot of work to update everything since they do not share the same themes and management schemes.

Does Drupal do it all?

Comments

Brian Puccio’s picture

Brian Puccio commented
  1. See the archive.module and the URL's it generates. You can create a URL for each month I believe.
  2. See the image.module though I'm not sure what version of GD it uses, I know I currently use it with ImageMagick.
  3. There is a forum, I know Drupal also supports subscribing to certain things, see the subscription.module for that.
  4. Yup. Taxonomy. There are several moduel contributions that let you play with taxonomy, I think the taxonomy and it's power is my favorite Drupal feature, next to how modular it is.
  5. Yes, there are a bunch of access/submission options for each type of content.

I hope this answered your questions, I'm sure someone who has played around with some of the features I haven't used a lot can chime in as well.

Give Drupal a spin, I think you'll find it does pretty much everything you need.

An aside: I've only used versions 4.3.0 and 4.3.1 of Drupal and modules that are released for 4.3 but there are many who are running Drupal based on the CVS version (Drupal.org as well as many others) and they seem to be happy as well.

HateSpitLove’s picture

HateSpitLove commented

Thanks for the info. I gave it a spin and I must say I am quite impressed so far. Not too much, not too little--just right. The only weak spot I found was the forum architecture however there might be those that prefer it over the phpbb style. I noticed some threads regarding phpbb integration so maybe I'll compromise in that respect.