Is Drupal the right CMS for me?
First time poster. Hopefully this is the right place to post this question - none of the other forums seemed suitable.
I've been researching CMS for a few weeks now and I'm 95% sold on Drupal. But, I wanted to run the basic concept of my website by the community before moving forward with my project. I'm creating a website that is going to include the following functions:
1) Custom user profiles - similar to MySpace
2) Advanced group management - different group levels (nodes?) where one group could be the parent of another group.
3) Forum system - I understand this is lacking in Drupal, but it doesn't need to be as powerful as vBulletin
4) Wiki - MediaWiki style
5) RSS support for multiple news feeds
6) Search & display of FullText & PDF documents. Each document (node?) will have index terms associated to it for search purposes.
7) SOAP support - a few of the content pages will generated via HTTP/SOAP protocol using XML as a response format and style-sheet will be applied for layout purposes.
Am I asking too much of Drupal (or any CMS for that matter)? I don't expect it to support items 1-7 right out of the box, but is Drupal the best CMS to start with and build ontop of? Thanks in advance for the help.
Corey
"2) Advanced group
"2) Advanced group management - different group levels (nodes?) where one group could be the parent of another group."
What do you mean by a "group"? Are you talking about groups of users or groups of content items? A node is basicly any kind of content item. It can be an event or an about page or a blog entry.
What are you trying to do with your site?
Brian
_
http://catholicmusiczine.com
http://eventzip.com
My definition of a group
My definition of a group would be a collection of users that are linked to one another under one profile. So, in a sense, a group is a profile and the collection of users associated to the group is the group's buddy list. Does that make sense?
Corey
OK. There is a buddy list
OK. There is a buddy list module and a module for organizing groups called organic groups. I can't remember if the organic groups lets you create a group profile.
It sounds like your interested in a lot of Social Networking stuff. I've looked at a number of free CMS and I think Drupal is the best I've found for social networking type stuff.
_
http://catholicmusiczine.com
http://eventzip.com
Right, social networking is
Right, social networking is definitely a large part of the site. The other half though is content management in the traditional sense - searching and retrieval of content (FullText and PDF) via indexed key words. Is Drupal a good choice for that type of thing?
Regarding item #7, another main area of the website will be generated via SOAP requests that return XML. I'll take that XML and format it to my liking with style-sheets. Can Drupal handle that easily?
1) the profile module will
1) the profile module will allow users to create profiles, however it lacks some of the advanced features seen elsewhere like "show this info to my friends only".
2) organic groups module allows you to group users into groups, but does not yet allow for hierarchical groups. There is a patch somewhere that is indented to allow that, but isn't complete.
--
Drupal services
My Drupal services
Aha, that's great
Aha, that's great information to know. I'm definitely not expecting Drupal to do everything I need right out of the box. I just want to make sure that I pick the right CMS and that I (or the person I pay to do all of the Drupal work) can customize to meet my need - ala the notion of hierarchical groups.
I did some more searching on
I did some more searching on the site and it looks like Drupal is limited for things such as SOAP. Anyone have any suggestions or know of any modules that exist for this already?
Another future goal of the site will be to integrate TeamSpeak. I saw a few modules that mentioned it, but nothing concrete. Anyone know if any modules exist for TeamSpeak?
Again, I do plan on needing to create a few modules to fit my own needs. Just trying to gauge how many will need to be created. Thanks again.
Corey
Drupal has built in XML-RPC,
Drupal has built in XML-RPC, but no SOAP. There is an asterisk integration module, I am not aware of a teamspeak module.
--
Drupal services
My Drupal services