By stevepuddick on

Hello everyone, I have read the documentation but it is still a bit unclear. I have a project and the requirements are as follows:

Needs: Member login area

- 140 members
- require unique usernames and passwords for each
- administrator privileges to set accessibility levels for each member
- ability to brand (at least with corporate colour) the login and interior (top banner etc. basic stuff)
- ability to post Word, PDF, Excel etc
- ability to make/leave comments

Would Drupal be the right approach for this? Would another CMS be better? Can anyone recommend any hosted solutions that can do this as well?

I was also wondering how long it usually takes to learn Drupal (particularly to implement the above features). I have some experience using the Zend Framework.

Thanks for any help.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

devin carlson’s picture

devin carlson commented

Hi,

All of the features that you listed are included with a stock Drupal installation.

  • Drupal can scale to thousands of members. Of course performance depends on your server setup.
  • You can allow users to register themselves and also allows you to disable this and simply create user accounts yourself.
  • Drupal allows administrators to create "roles" which can then be assigned to registered users. Each role contains a set of permissions such as posting comments, uploading files and being able to change their own user name. Drupal's permission set is quite extensive.
  • Customization is mostly done via theming but some themes allow you to use a color picker to change a theme's color using a simple color-picker tool. Most themes also have the ability to upload a logo and change basic information such as the name, slogan and mission of your site. You can also download a variety of different themes for free from the themes section of this website.
  • Using the built in upload module, you will be able to easily attach files to posts
  • Also, a built in comment module will allow whoever you give permissions to the ability to post comments

I think that Drupal would be a great CMS for the task you described and could be setup in a very short amount of time. Chances are you won't even need to code anything yourself.

The largest part of a project like this would be the time required to familiarize yourself with Drupal terminology and navigating an administration interface.

stevepuddick’s picture

stevepuddick commented

Ok, thanks a lot. This was very helpful.

devenderdagar’s picture

devenderdagar commented

Hi

Whatever you are looking for your project are really very much possible in drupal. Drupal is built for this kind of work. You can learn drupal very easily in 15-30 days.

Cheers