Hi all,
Thanks for reading. I am about to start a project with a group of students. I feel the key for our success is to select the right tool with the right flexibility to avoid hitting a wall down the road. We all have some PHP knowledge, but we're wondering whether Drupal is the most adequate tool or better alternatives exist. I really want the flexibility, because if successful, this project could be adopted by the university and enhanced over the years.
So here is an overview of what we plan to do:
1- The idea is to create a collaboration space, where university students have accounts and can publish research articles (ideally with a WISIWIG editor). By default articles are in draft and only visible by the author(s) until published.
2- Articles are assigned a categories
3- Articles can be searched by title and/or category.
4- Collaboration
a- authors can request any other users to help by providing ad-hoc write privileges to an article.
b- Users should have the ability to search, rate articles and add comment to articles (like a forum).
5- Users have a personal space with their details and ability to exchange messages.
6- Users can create folders&subfolders in their personal space to organise articles they authored and also "bookmark" articles posted by others. If an article they bookmarked is updated: they get a notification message.
7- Version control for articles would be great in case roll back required.
8- It would be great to be able to make articles private or only visible to a few (probably need group management).
This is a rough overview. I do not believe a Wiki would have the flexibility although I'd love to be corrected. Drupal is apparently a very versatile CMS and may have the right flexibility. We looked at Joomla which is easier but not flexible. Any pointers regarding Drupal recommended modules are welcome.
Thank you! Chloe.
Comments
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No problem here, plenty of choice in WYSIWYG editors that can be used within Drupal (check out the WYSIWYG module or the CKeditor module)
Again no problem, Drupal's core Workflow setting can handle this. For something more complex, i.e. with editors, you need some additional modules (Rules).
Vocabularies and Taxonomies in Drupal terminology
if you're not happy with the core search functionality (full node search capabilities), the faceted search module should be able to do this.
A basic Permission control based on Roles and Content Types are in core but you might need something more flexible, ie Content Access module
not exactly sure whether Content Access can handle this.
Search, see above
Rate, Fivestar module
Comment is in core, works the same as here.
Profile is in core, plenty of modules that extend that, e.g. Content Profile and Privatemsg
That's the only one I'm struggling to think of a solution at the moment.
The flag module
Maybe the Rules allows you to do this.
Revision is in core, see content type settings. There's also the Diff module that enhances this, afaik.
Again, the Content Access module might be able to do this, or Organic Groups. I haven't used either with this purpose yet so I can't tell for sure.
As a final note Drupal >>>> Joomla.
Re: "6- Users can create
Re: "6- Users can create folders&subfolders ...", content is stored in the database, not the file system. Categorizing content serves this purpose in Drupal.
while that's true, there
while that's true, there might still be instances where the author/user might want to categorise their articles/bookmarks differently and independent from the public taxonomies.
Community tags might be able to do just that, as far as I can remember, the tags can be set to private, and together with view, you'd have your category system in place.