By jtbowlin on

Hi,

I'm going to setup a community website and wanted to make sure that Drupal can meet my needs before I get started. I was looking at Wordpress as well, but I think Drupal is probably better suited from what I've read.

Features (tabs) I want on my website:

User authentication
Blog Page (users can comment)
Image Gallery (users can upload, rate, and comment)
Video Gallery (users can upload, rate, and comment)
Forums
Custom Page (like a talent calculator for World of Warcraft)
Custom Page (like a skills list in table format)
RSS Feed Generation

That's it really. Probably pretty standard apart from the custom pages.

Also, should I stick with v6 or go for v7?

Thanks in advance for your help,

JT

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

Yes drupal can do this

Do not use Drupal 7.x it isn't ready for production and doesn't have a stable release.

jtbowlin’s picture

jtbowlin commented

Thanks. Any recommendations for modules I should be using for this project?

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

welcome!

user, blog, forums, custom pages, and rss are part of core. For image galleries I recommend the method described at http://www.lullabot.com/articles/photo-galleries-views-attach which uses modules that have been added to core for d7. For video, it all depends on how you want to handle it (uploaded, embedded from other sites, etc) and what type of video you plan to host (flv, mov, etc). Browsing the media category will give you an idea of what's available. You'll probably also want to look at the advanced_forum module which greatly enhances drupal's core forums.

thebeardedguy’s picture

thebeardedguy commented

I read through, can someone point me to a link to see how Drupal's online forum works??? Is it capable enough to replace vBulletin??? I am looking for an open source application to do just that???

Any help will be appreciated, thanks!

thebeardedguy’s picture

thebeardedguy commented

I found what I was looking for in the Drupal Showcase Forum and particularly this link http://drupal.org/node/9227

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

uh... you're using drupal's forum ;-)

To see advanced_forum in action there's a link on the project page to checkout a demo.

walloon’s picture

walloon commented

You get these with the core Drupal 6 installation, just be sure to enable them:

  • User authentication (well, you don't have to enable this)
  • Blog
  • RSS
  • Forums (although you may want to use the Advanced Forum module)

For images and video, there's a standard suite of modules most people use for this. See this video: http://www.drupalove.com/drupal-video/creating-basic-drupal-image-gallery Just make sure to enable the video component of embedded media field to extend this to video.

For your custom pages, I'd start with CCK fields and see if you can make it work in your theme. Otherwise, the Panels module is an extremely flexible way of making pages look almost any way you want.

You may want to try the Drupal Cookbook to get started: http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/tutorials/beginners-cookbook

Hope that helps

WebNewCastle’s picture

WebNewCastle commented

Drupal would be a great solution.

There are lots of ways to do the image gallery and video gallery. For image galleries, I often use CCK, Views, ImageAPI, and Imagecache, along with others depending on the presentation.

For the voting, you might look at a module like Five Star - http://drupal.org/project/fivestar

For your custom pages, you may want to add custom content types (a Drupal core feature) and other modules and/or theme development depending on what you want to do with the custom pages.

If you want to do something very specific / more advanced with RSS feeds, there are solutions for this as well - including using Views with Views Bonus Pack.

infotechnologist’s picture

infotechnologist commented

I did not read the other comments, as I just wanted to drop a few recommendations.
The user authentification, blog page, rss feed can all be accomplished without any additional modules. Just download/install drupal and read through the core modules and you'll find the mods you need to do those things listed.

For the image and video you want to look at two things..CCK module and Views module. For CCK it has extensions for video file types, file uploads, and images. Utilizing a combination of views and CCK you can easily setup the image and video gallery completely..then you can use Drupal's internal commenting and rating modules to handle the other parts of both of those types of pages.

The skills list is easy..just setup a new page and create a standard HTML table with a list of skills...

For the talent calculator..the easiest thing is get a third party WoW talent calculator and get some code to embed it as a widget..building one of those from scratch can take awhile.

Do not use V7 because it's not ready for stable release yet.