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By davidr45 on
Hi everyone,
I have been a Joomla person for a while, but have become frustrated with a number of it's limitations, which I see that Drupal seems to overcome! So, I am starting on my first Drupal site, and (while I have a fair understanding of how things work), I would like to ask what I should be preparing for for the following project...
The website is for a business consulting firm. They need to establish themselves as a leader in business intelligence, so they will have a blog/article library. The idea being that they will attract people to the site with the content, and then visitors will see the services on offer. Here, however, is where the questionmark comes:
There will be a number of pages for the services offered (buy a marketing plan, mentoring plan, establish a registered business, etc), and these services can be categorised quite easilty (Business Establishment, Corporation Services, Marketing Services, etc.). Each service group will be summarised in a sidebar block. The thing is that the sidebar blocks need to be visible for relevant linking to the article content.
There will be a few authors writing articles for the consultancy. The author should ideally have a place where the article is submitted to choose the categories that the article relates to. For example, if the article is about website evaluation, then the categories "Online Services" and "Marketing Services" should be selected, while "Company Establishment", and "Corporation Services" should not. Ideally they should be ranked in order of relevance too in order show them in the correct order.
Another nice-to-have would be PDA/Mobile access to the site, and different themes for different site names.
Finally, I need to create a newsletter that is generated periodically highlighting certain articles, based on popularity and date (most recent). All images should be embedded in the newsletter in order to ensure prettyness at the client-side.
My question is. What version of Drupal should I be using, and what modules should I be learning in order to achieve this? I obviously need to theme, I briefly saw a module called "Related Content", would this be valuable? Which newsletter components should I be looking at? Basically, could someone give me a friendly pointer as to where to start...
Thanks in advance
David Russell
Comments
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Welcome aboard! As a previous user of joomla, I can assure you, you will find drupal infinitely more flexible. Though there is a learning curve, once you've scaled it you'll be glad you did.
Regarding your related services blocks, the http://drupal.org/project/related_content module seems to have never actually launched. Have no fear however, there are several modules that address similar functionality or you can accomplish something similar to this with the core taxonomy (for the categories) and contributed http://drupal.org/project/views module (though I'm not sure how to order by relevance).
There's also several options for newsletter functionality as well.
As for what version of drupal-- at this point, it's d6, no question.
You can see my current list of toolbox modules at: http://drupal.org/node/451906#comment-1598758
Good Luck!
Phew. That's a lot, and I
Phew. That's a lot, and I only have a minute. Very quickly....
Drupal 6 for sure.
Taxonomy for categorizing content.
Views for displaying that content (based on category or what ever else you want). Can be displayed as a block in the sidebar. It has a learning curve but is well worth it. You'll use it for everything. (Related content module may be good but I've never used it.)
I know there is at least one email newsletter module but if they are serious about that sort of thing, I'd probably look into a third party solution like mailchimp for the analytics and protection from getting blacklisted as a spammer.
Good luck and welcome to Drupal!