How to build this site in Drupal
Hi guys. With the latest release of vBulletin's "early upgrade" pricing, I have decided to migrate all of my projects off of vBulletin and create all my new projects with drupal.
As much as I don't care for the forums, which I don't think provide enough "fun" items (such as points for being active, number of thank yous for answering questions, etc.), I'm preferring to be with software that I don't pay punishing upgrade pricing without even having the benefit of the software. Drupal is a rock solid CMS and the forums may be usable. Here's what I want to build.
I am building a site that let's say is for plant enthusiasts. People have a bunch of different plants in their homes so there is a relationship of one to many I'm hoping you can keep in mind. Originally I was going to have the forum software be the main registration point and set up vb profiles to have a checkbox for each kind of plant you own. In searching, you can search to find the people who own the same plants you do. You can see their profiles, pictures of their plants individually, etc.
I'm aware that drupal can make great sites but it's an incredible devil in the details. For example, I don't even know how to make sure that the forum and sites are properly SEOed, as even the forums here have an unsightly URL being drupal.org/node/etc./123454. Second, I'd like to best be able to set up profiling so that
(a) users can publish articles and you can see all the articles a user publishes in the profile or via a link
(b) set up user profiling - I'm aware that there are various modules but it was like a maze trying to figure out what optimal combinations are, especially with all the need for custom programming to make things look and act good. Is there a "best" module like joomla has (e.g. communitybuilder which I think is now supplanted by jomsocial or something else.)
(c) Media gallery - this is very important. I hate the ones that just throw stuff out in one big pile of dung. What these really need are some very basic drilldown, e.g. search to find pictures you want to find either by tags or by criteria such as the section where the pictures may be nicely divided or information within the poster's profile. For example, how do I find all the pictures of Jade plants or people who have Jade plants?
(d) Forum improvements - what have been made to make the forums a little more exciting than just strict text? How about a tag bar so that users don't have to type in all the html tags manually. My users will hate doing that even though I am used to it. How about embedding pictures easily or links? That is a must as users like to post anchor text without manually typing everything in.
(e) SEO - where do we find this? My history with drupal has been notoriously poor urls. This seems to have changed.
(f) Templates - there are some but I don't want them to scream "looks and feels and acts like drupal."
OK, that's a good start. I have a great idea for a site. After using Joomla for a long time, I can honestly say that the thousands of plugins do LOOK amazing and the designs are fantastic. But you can never get away from a heavy site that feels, acts and is a ratcheted in set of plugins that are always very awkward to use and administrate. That's why I'm here. Willing to put in the time but need a good amount of rapid in the development. Thanks and look forward to being more active here.
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a) can be done with http://drupal.org/project/views
b) there's really only 2 options for d6 (soon to be one for d7): core profile and contributed http://drupal.org/project/content_profile modules. core profile is extremely basic so I think you'll want content_profile.
c) I like the method described at http://www.lullabot.com/articles/photo-galleries-views-attach which will probably become the standard with the addition of imagefield and imagecache to core for d7. You can easily add support for audio and video with the http://drupal.org/project/swftools or http://drupal.org/project/flashvideo + http://drupal.org/project/audio modules.
d) http://drupal.org/project/advanced_forum with some of the modules from http://drupal.org/node/227121
e) not sure where you get that-- drupal is actually known for the ease of creating friendly urls out-of-the-box with the core path module and, optionally, with the contributed http://drupal.org/project/pathauto module. Way easier than the joomla options last time I tried.
f) there's the ones available here and more and more are popping up elsewhere, just google around. For some good looking drupal sites see http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites
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Don't be a Help Vampire - read and abide the forum guidelines.
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All fairly common
Everything you mention is fairly common and straightforward so long as you understand that Drupal is a development framework. This doesn't mean you have to write PHP code, but it does mean that it's your responsibility to figure out how to configure it. For example, the tools based on the Voting API module and User Points module apply directly to your use case, but you have to figure out how. The price of absolute flexibility is that responsibility for making choices falls to you.
Drupal's SEO is excellent. Drupal.org doesn't happen to take advantage of Pathauto and Nodewords (meta tags) modules, but many sites do.
As for looking like a Drupal site, see http://skirt.com/
Thank you - my responses
Yes, I understand that drupal is a framework but it can be an incredibly expensive framework. Skirt looks great but how much time and money did it cost to build it? I know of a drupal powered publishing site, a magazine with some social networking, which cost tens of thousands of dollars to build and also to theme. If using the framework costs me $20-45,000 to build a site that approaches Skirt, I have other choices to do what I need for a fraction of that cost. As I said, the devil is in the details and there is a need to have some list of how to put together the most common set of functions that people need/want.
Worldfalzz - THANK YOU!!!! This is more of what I need. Someone who has done this before to point me in certain directions. I remember there was some guide here to put together a social networking site using drupal but it is for version 5. Given that you're saying that version 6 has its limitations, is there any benefit to using Drupal 7? It doesn't seem to be out yet or finalized and I don't want to get caught developing for v6 when v7 is an imminent release, will promise much more and will make for a very difficult upgrade path from 6 to 7?
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Drupal 6 is awesome-- d7 will be an improvement (as with any sw upgrade). D7 is nowhere near ready for site building yet and there's always an upgrade path-- definitely go with d6.
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Don't be a Help Vampire - read and abide the forum guidelines.
If you find my assistance useful, please pay it forward to your fellow drupalers.
Awesome - THANK YOU. Last
Awesome - THANK YOU. Last question. If I was going to set up profiling where user fields would be most important, as I said the plants each person has, where they live, etc. Is there an advanced search feature that allows users to search these fields that people entered in the search? It's nice to have those characteristics in profiles but it makes for very little use to have all that profile info, tags, media with tags, and user information without every being able to search and find what you want.
Thank you again so much. As a result of our discussion, I am going to put up one of my new "test" sites using drupal and which should get quite a bit of publicity given what it is.
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Yep you can set up all sorts of custom search pages with views and exposed filters.
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Don't be a Help Vampire - read and abide the forum guidelines.
If you find my assistance useful, please pay it forward to your fellow drupalers.
Thanks. I realize now the
Thanks. I realize now the huge difference between Drupal and anything else. It can build sites that can be controlled to minute levels but setting up a site can take several days. If you need something up quick and easy with extensible modules, drupal is not the solution. I've been looking at various user guides but I can see why drupal, imho, isn't for anyone who really doesn't have programming experience, patience, and a desire to do serious development. I guess the key to developing drupal is spending a few weeks understanding the system and modules and then creating your own "predone" site to use as a clone for any other sites you develop. Templating is another challenge. Thanks again for leading me in the right directions.
I've looked at the templates that are available and, sadly, most of them are pitiful. The ones that are on sites like CNN, college sites or other take tremendous work. This is why I've seen barely passable templates costing $200-300. This area will take some time since I usually modified reasonably good templates and with Wordpress, Joomla, or even any other quasi CMS and forum templates were affordable and plentiful.
I've downloaded a list of 50 most popular modules and will begin to play with them. I was surprised that out of the box there is nothing there and one needs to set every single item up from scratch, apparently. Trying to understand right now what "nodes" means and why that folder/level is required. It's exasperating but I'll try to plow my way through it. Hopefully this will be worth the effort but it's traveling at a snail's pace compared to what I've been used to. My feeling is that there needs to be a very good user's guide if the community here will ever grow towards the mainstream. Then again, perhaps by nature of what drupal is that wasn't going to happen anyways. Thanks again everyone.
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sounds more like you want an installation profile, or an acquia drupal package and what you have is drupal core. you can download install profiles from http://drupal.org/project
Drupal core, is a development framework and as such the community is development oriented. In other words, we like our legos and building stuff with them, including installation profiles, though there aren't as many as there could be and based on the front page news, there will be more coming.
Some module suggestions
http://shellsn.com/node/613
Not an install profile yet. D7 install profiles are supposed to be better so I might do one once that comes out.
Michelle
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I'm looking for folks to help me out by posting in my Coulee Region forums. You don't need to live in the area; there's plenty of general forums. But please, no Drupal support questions. :)