I'm looking at technologies to use for an online/offline music community I'm setting up. It's going to be a Creative Commons project based in Reading, England, inviting local creative types to come together and create, remix and publish their work under CC licenses.
Basically the site will need:
- News / articles
- Entries for music categorised by genre / artist
- Attached entries for remixes, artwork, lyrics, poetry, etc.
So good content management, and a design that hides all of Drupal's architecture so it is easy to navigate around the content. I want a user to be able to hit the front page, browse the music by genre/artist, see an original track and all of its attached entries, and see the meta-data associated with each. They then have to be able to register, upload new content and attach content to existing entries... all easily :)
Now from what I've read, Drupal seems to be able to do it, but is it going to be easy to do? I'm also looking at solutions like Plone and rolling my own, but those seem like more work than Drupal. What sort of work am I looking at to get the site going with Drupal?
Comments
Example
This site may be of interest to you as an example of what can be done with Drupal:
Illect Recordings
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Drupal Specialists: Consulting, Development & Training
Robert Castelo, CTO
Code Positive
London, United Kingdom
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me too
I've been working with Drupal for a few months now, and I think it's ideal for these kind of projects. I'm setting up a music collaboration site, so uploads have been a problem, but I'm gradually getting it under control! It is quite tricky to 'hide Drupal's architecture' though, you will need to learn the theme system, but if you want to replace basic terms like 'story / taxonomy' etc, you will have to dig a bit deeper. Still, I think it's worth it!
My site: http://www.dash.yi.org (not finished by a long way)
How much work?
Thanks for your reply, Dash. You mention that you've been working on it for months... how quickly do you think I could do it now, given that no doubt things have improved since you started out?
I don't want to have to spend more than a day or two working at this if possible. Is that too ambitious for a Drupal-based project? Any tips / advice?
A fair bit (for me)
Well I didn't really know anything about SQL, PHP or Apache, let alone Drupal when I started out, so admittedly most of my work has been on getting things to play nicely together, but presuming all that's working and you are happy to use the generic themes it should be fairly straightforward.
You need to get your head around the way taxonomy works, because that is what you build a Drupal site around (this is explained in the documentation section of this site). For what you want to do, a look at the 'artist' and 'article' module will help, and you will definitely need the 'filestore2' (and fscache) module from CVS if you're using large files.
Otherwise, Drupal is like a block of clay (not my analogy) which can be molded into whatever you want it to be. While it's not as quick or easy to set up as other (spit) nuke-style sites, it is well worth it in the long run and version 4.5 is looking to be really good...
Filestore2
One more question about filestore2 (since there's no documentation, and it's a little difficult to tell by looking at example web sites):
Can you have a page for an upload nicely formatted (without requiring HTML or pseudo-HTML input from the user), and allow people to attach items to that page without needing permissions to edit it, so you get, for example:
description, etc.
Attached media:
To restate the question: can you do that already with Drupal + filestore, or would it require getting into the PHP code and modifying it significantly?
flexinode
you might want to try that module.
I'd try the flexinode module.
I'd try the flexinode module. It lets you define arbitrary forms. I've been working on it to add thumbnail generation and better css support.
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Drupal services
My Drupal services
quick message..
Hi Tom,
I'm working on a free music site for UK artists and musicians at the moment that maybe a nice tie in with what youre proposing. Have dropped you a quick email at the tom chance address in your name. Just in case it doesn't get through. Can you drop me a quick email at dub@dublindrupaller.com?
Cheers
dub
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate
Look at A-Cappella.it
You can take a look at A-Cappella.it, a multilingual portal dedicated to A-cappella music.
Matteo
music sites
hey MegaGrunt -- big ups for the link to our site (illect)
From the initial look, what you're trying to do isn't too terribly deviant from any site that needs a CMS, and definitely doable with drupal, with some measure of ease.
the taxonomy feature lends itself nicely to what you want to do, as does the filestore (and it looks like, filestore2?) plugin(s). Your main concern will be the limit set by your sysadmin on the maximum packet size of database uploads, i believe.
What it looks like you'll want though as well, is the ability for users to contribute to building the taxonomy. This is something i haven't explored.
j(drupal fiend).
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Jon Madison, Consultant
Thought For Food Tech Software
http://www.tfftech.com/
If you're still deciding
I'm doing a whole series of music sites with MP3 up/download, resumes, blogs, classifieds etc. I think Drupal is perfect for these things. Drop me a line rob@robshouse.net and let me know how your sites are going. If we have common ground we can swap RSS feeds.
- Robert Douglass
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visit me at www.robshouse.net
Love to visit your sites
Hi Rob,
I would be interested in visiting your mp3 sites using drupal. I visited www.robshouse.net and saw a nice, but basic drupal site.
Not online yet
Yes, robshouse is just my playground. The music sites aren't online yet. They are still at least a month out, due to all the custom programming.
- Robert Douglass
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visit me at www.robshouse.net
Drupal as friendly musicans site
It looks to me like this site might be a big customized Drupal multimedia site:
music.lulu.com/category/6032
I am guessing it is so from the nature of its url arguments. If they can do it, you probably can too.
I would bet you could turn Drupal into a friendly musicians site with only 6 months worth of intense work.
Historically, the drupal community is not known for helping newbies, so you will be on your own probably until your programming skills put you on an equal footing with the other developers.
Not Drupal, imo
I don't think it is Drupal. Drupal doesn't have a homepage.php, nor an advanced search. The forums are different as well. Definitely looks like a *Nuke product to me.
- Robert Douglass
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visit me at www.robshouse.net
I'm actually building one...
I'm actually building a music community, and in 2 hours I got an amazing result !
http://inity.reggae-dub.com
Drupal so powerful, really amazing next to Joomla.
Alois Cochard, webmaster/admin of :
http://inity.Reggae-Dub.com (Drupal 5)
http://www.Almighty-Dub.com (Joomla 1)
http://open.Reggae-Dub.com (Joomla 1)
Me too!
I have been building my site for the last week:
http://musicollaborate.com/
It is hard work, but worth it. I think I am about half way to what I want, but the site is fully operational, I just have to figure out the taxonomies, and search fields and how to get my audio playing nicely in the browser.