By sunrisetk on

Hello,

I had enough of Joomla, now wanting to switch to Drupal. From what I play around in it so far, it is great.
But I do have few things I want to ask before starting to develop my site in Drupal.

I have developed a small Japan Travel site, with reviews, comments, lists, maps, and so forth, as you see here:
www.maujudi.com

So I want make a similar page using Drupal. I know that Drupal is capable of this, but here are my questions;

1. How do I or what modules, extensions do I use to make a review site with stars or numbers? nodevote module?
2. Is there a way to make a dynamic table, to list acording to name, price, location, and or area that you can click on to sort according to decending or acsending order? What module or extension do I use?
3. How is the google map implementation? are there any examples using Drupal and Google map?
4. Is there a module or extension to implement Flickr photo gallery?

Regards.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

rcross’s picture

rcross commented

HI,

i haven't actually created a site like you're talking about but here is my suggestions

1) yep, node vote and vote api are what you should be looking at, probably all CCK to define a custom node type
2) sounds like you're looking for the views modules
3) From what i know, google maps works well. There was a recent screencast about doing a google maps mashup with drupal. didn't even require any coding, just clicks. Also, search in the forums for other examples
4) I'm not sure if there is a dedicated flickr module, but there are two options for you that I know of. one is to use agregator or aggregator 2 module to pull your flickr rss feed into your site. The other option would be to simply create your own block and put it in there. I guess you could also create a regular node (page) with php code inside it if you prefer that instead, so actually at least 3 ways.

--Ryan

--Ryan
Ryan Cross
James Cross Construction Services
Project Management Software

green monkey’s picture

green monkey commented

Welcome to Drupal!

But I have to admit, I am curious, what was it that you didn't like about Joomla?

sunrisetk’s picture

sunrisetk commented

1. Too slow - Maybe this is due to my host server, but Joomla uses components that seems heavy, sluggish, and thus making it slow. You can probably experience it yourself on my site. www.maujudi.com

2. Not sef or seo friendly. Using many of the components, they are not all search engine name friendly, thus making some of my sites look like adfadas/kjojuoi/343--dfasl....., not good.

3. Templates not being flexible. They have module placements within each templates. If you know some coding, yes, it maybe able to make or move them around, but I am not that experienced, so this is difficult to do.

4. I dont like the entire section, category, and items setup. Also, I found modules and manbots a bit confusing at times. Some mambots only works on items and not cetegories, or vice versa.

I dont mean to be harsh on Joomla, I liked to at the begging, but now I will try Drupal.

Regards.

drubeedoo’s picture

drubeedoo commented
  1. I haven't seen much difference in performance between the two in a base configuration, though it's apples & oranges. Drupal can also be a heavy pig if you load every "cool" module and expect it to run fast in a shared hosting environment. I'm hoping that file-based caching makes it into core one day.
  2. Hands down, Drupal rocks.
  3. Templates are extremely flexible in Drupal, but that flexibility comes at the price of editing phpTemlate files. Don't be put off by the PHP code, it is relatively simple to edit the template files once you get the hang of it. Cross-browser CSS on the other hand can be a b*tch, but this isn't a Drupal issue. Stick with lighter CSS themes and stay away from FriendsElectric/Spread Firefox themes until you're more comfortable with CSS.
  4. I too found Joomla/Mambo confusing in this regard. Drupal is much easier, though the Administrator menu bloat can get high at times. Some modules place their config in the Administer menu while others seem to place them in Administer >> Settings (or both). It's a lot better than Joomla/Mambo though... a module is a module and you can pretty much expect how they will affect a node.

Drupal can get complicated under the hood. Don't get discouraged, it's well worth the time. Good luck!

treksler’s picture

treksler commented
  1. performance should be a wash - i run both and neither is slow
  2. Open-SEF.org has a plugin for doing sef in joomla
  3. to move a module around in Joomla! you can go to the backend and move it using a dropdown menu - doesn't get any easier
  4. the linearity of drupal clearly loses here for usability, but wins for configurabilty of who sees what menu item

The two systems are actually more similar than they seem at first
eg joomla modules are called blocks in drupal, but they are the same thing
etc.

There are clear reasons for choosing Drupal over Joomla (multisites, taxonomy, fine grained user access)
but the above four reasons are not very good reasons, because Drupal really isn't any better in those particular respects.

green monkey’s picture

green monkey commented

sunrisetk

well I have to admint - I can't recall the last Iime I searched on "adfadas" :-)

Drupal , is going to give you a lot of tools and please expect a deep learning curve. This is a great group of people and the standars are high.

If you're trying to decide which version to use Druapl 4.7.1 or 4.6.6, look at the modules and themes first, not all the module or themes are 4. 7 ready yet.

But if its 50/50 ... I would go 4.7 the modules are coming up daily.

sunrisetk’s picture

sunrisetk commented

Thanks, from the looks of it, I will be seeking help from this forum quit often.
I will let you know when I get things going and progress.

Regards

Carlos Miranda Levy’s picture

Carlos Miranda Levy commented

1. How do I or what modules, extensions do I use to make a review site with stars or numbers? nodevote module?

There is a review module - I just gave it a try and the stars look fine. There is something wrong with the link generated, but that can be easily fixed in the code -- and in theory has already been fixed. Here's a quick test I did last night in a test site I'm putting together with most of the contrib modules installed: http://civic.socinfo.com/review

2. Is there a way to make a dynamic table, to list acording to name, price, location, and or area that you can click on to sort according to decending or acsending order? What module or extension do I use?

Flexinode will do that for you. I've heard of CCK and gave it a try, but it was still missing some stuff and didn't work quite as well for me. The standard advise I guess would be to go with CCK, but if you don't understand it or feel limited, then go with flexinode which has been around the block for quite a while a works great. It allows you to create custom node types (get used to calling content node here) for you to enter info -- such as an article or blog with extra fields and you get to choose which fields to show in teaser (summary view) and in table view (full list of nodes), etc. Tables are dynamic and can be sorted in most implementations thanks to Drupal powerful API and theme functions.

3. How is the google map implementation? are there any examples using Drupal and Google map?

It is a great implementation. Even comes with a macro generator (you look at the map, zoom to the level of your liking, select the options you want from a form (sat, map, hybr), add the balloons u want and it generates the code for u to insert in your content. Users can completely interact with the map and even add balloons or lines by clicking on the map. It does not support -- at least that I'm aware of -- execution of additional commands once the map is generated (that is, automatically wait 5 seconds, zoom in, go to Bogota, switch to Map mode, zoom out, goto sat mode, go to Caracas, zoom in, switch to map mode, etc.) which is a nice feature but hardly ever used.
You can see some test samples clicking on the link below...
http://civic.socinfo.com/carlosmirandalevy/blog/mappingcaribbeancountries

4. Is there a module or extension to implement Flickr photo gallery?

Dunno bout flickr much, but if they have an API, then it can be done.
There is a module that allows integration with Menalto Gallery, which rocks.
Another option is to use RSS feeds for this. Drupal supports pics in incoming RSS feeds.
So if flickr can generate RSS feeds with pics, you can pull them with Drupal's aggregator and display them.
That's what I did to pull pics from Menalto Gallery before there was an integration module...

So you see, like they say out there...
DRUPAL RULEZ!!!!
Drup On, dude...

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