Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.
By jabevan on
I posted this in parts in a response in a different thread.
I'm hoping to find a good CMS solution that I can commit to for all my projects (members only non-profit site, niche community/news site, intranet, artist community, etc). Can someone give me a quick reply on how Drupal stacks up for each of these:
1) members only site: admins post stories/surveys, custom user data (company name, user, contact info, etc.) compiled in a directory...
2) snowboard.com type niche site (this is probably a bad example).
3) company internet/extranet: FAQ, Help Desk, groups for posting and viewing content/announcements, company directory, etc. etc.
4) DeviantArt.com / Renderosity.com type art communities.
I currently have, or have had, these type of projects. Drupal seems very promising. I'm also interested in what direction the project is going and what needs it's looking to fulfill in the near future and over the next few years...
Also, I noticed there really isn't a way to contribute to the Drupal project. I'm in the fortunate position of having some corporate backing and would definitely want to contribute to whichever CMS ends up being my best solution.
Thanks,
JAB*
Comments
Can I tag along on this quest
Can I tag along on this question?
I'm looking for much the same but:
#1. *Easily* capable of producing human readable, search engine friendly urls.
#2. Each major page should have it's own meta keywords.
#3. An email to discussion feature for the forum. Users should be able to post email (or sms) and have it automatically posted to the forum.
Thanks in advance!!
I'm sorry, I know this questi
I'm sorry, I know this question's been asked a thousand times but I was hoping I could get an overall take on each of the different kinds of sites. Nothing in detail, maybe even just a "yes" or "no".
I have a members only site that is extremely urgent. The project was started in PHP-Nuke, is badyly screwed up and getting worse! Can someone tell me if Drupal is a workable solution for this:
members only site:
1) a few public pages but most content for members only
2) closed membership (no ability to register or access members only pages w/o membership)
3) admins post stories/surveys
4) custom user data (company name, user, contact info, etc.) compiled in a member directory (almost yellow pages like)...
This one is urgent; however, I'm very interested in the Drupal's possibilities with the above.
I appreciate any comments.
Thanks,
JAB*
Drupal will do most of what y
Drupal will do most of what you want, however it takes some time to learn how Drupal does things. I find there is a learning curve for most people. Drupal is not a slam-bang, add a theme, type of cms.
Its power lies in its taxonomy of nodes and how nodes interact. I would say it is far better suited for a text type of site, rather than a graphical. Then i saw this amazing drupal site
http://www.terminus1525.ca/site?l=en which is nearly purely graphics.
So Drupal can do just about anything if you have the time to figure out how to do it.
Cheers
cris
Is it possible to create a me
Is it possible to create a members only site with a few pages of public info and a whole site of members only info and community tools (members site that is restricted, and members are only added by the admin)?
I definitely don't expect a weekend CMS system. What I'm hoping for is a system that I can commit to that wont dissappoint me 6 months into it.....
Yes
It is relatively easy to set up your Drupal site like you've described. As for being disappointed 6 months down the road, I think the opposite will be true. In 6 months, when you've learned how to do everything, you'll be very happy with the power and flexibility you have.
- Robert Douglass
-----
visit me at www.robshouse.net
permissions
the members only site with only a few pages of public info is the difficult part. right now, drupal has one global content permissions setting that either sets every node type available to anonymous users or not. there are some contributed alternatives which allow more fine grained permissions. you should investigate the status of those by searching the forums here. there was also a discussion on the drupal-devel mailing list in the last few months which proposed ideas for the best way to integrate such content control into drupal core.
of course, if you only need a few pages of public content, would be easy enough to create a few static html pages using your drupal site theme structure, post them to your drupal directory, and allow drupal to handle all of the rest of the private part of the site. once the finer permission settings are part of core, those static html pages could be added back into the drupal site and drupal url aliasing would maintain the legacy addresses.
permissions discussion
What you want to read to learn about contributed permissions modules is here http://drupal.org/node/view/8917
- Robert Douglass
-----
visit me at www.robshouse.net
Robert - Thanks for your comm
Robert - Thanks for your comments, I appreciate them. I'll be installing Drupal today to check it out. And will search and read about the permissions modules.
The reason static pages aren't a reasonable solution is that the non-profit I'm developing this for needs to maintain the site themselves. They are very small (only 2 full time staff) and would not be able to maintain the site with anything other than a good CMS.
XOOPS actually looks like a very good solution for this kind of permissioning, but they completely lack in the community aspects I'm looking for (in other projects). For community sites I think extensible user profiles, community/personal blogs/web pages is a must (on this note, is it at all possible to automate the creation and linking of a subdomain to a user profile page, i.e. user.communitysite.com???).
Thanks again for your comments. I look forward to diving in to Drupal over the holiday.
JAB*
Groups & Permissions
Robert - I read mda's summary here:
http://apacam.org/drupalaccess.html
But I'm still not quite catching the differences and which will suit my purposes the best. I think this is an extremely important and broad issue, and consideration for core development.
Basically, what I have is a non-profit that represents retirement homes in North Carolina. For the associations site there are a handful of public pages (accessible by anonymous), and then a number of group features and content (accessible by registered). To break it down further, at times the CEO of the association will be required to email particular groups (i.e. CEOs of the retirement homes, CFOs of the retirement homes, etc). It does look like this might be possible with Drupal, but I'm struggling to find a starting point.
Can you make any suggestions? Neil Drumm's groupapi looked promising, but did not seem highly regarded by mda.
Any comments would be appreciated.
Thanks,
JAB*
Will require patience and/or coding
This is a really hot topic, and I feel that it should be a big priority for the 4.5 release (late August?). Until then, I don't think we can expect a stable and somewhat complete solution to be available, unless we code it ourselves (work with what's out there - start from scratch...)
I haven't installed all of the modules listed in the article above, so it could be that one or more of them really do work well enough for my or your needs. That is of course, the logical place to start; install them all and test them. I'm holding out for 4.5, though, as I don't stand a chance of getting my site with groups done until September anyway.
Maybe you can check around and confirm that this issue is going to be clearly addressed in 4.5.
- Robert Douglass
-----
visit me at www.robshouse.net
Gasp
You mean the terminus siote was made with drupal? :jawdrop:
Wow. I already thought Drupal was pretty awesome, now I have something to aspire too...
Things are going pretty good
Things are going pretty good so far, but I have a few questions (this should probably be posted under another forum, but for context's sake I'll add it here).
I have static pages setup for the public pages right now; however, my home page is giving a summary of the content I've added. I'd like the home page to show the full content. How can I do this?
My second question is about the links bar. I've added it to the top of my page. It's referring to the homepage as "home". How can I change this (i.e. to "Home")? I've looked all through the files and cannot find the reference for the homepage anywhere...
The site can be viewed here:
http://www.ncanpha.org/drupal-4.4.2/
Thank you!
JAB*
easily changed
if you intend on using the information available at http://www.ncanpha.org/drupal-4.4.2/?q=node/view/6 as the only content on the main page in the main column, you could reset the front page. there's an option in admin->configuration.
otherwise, put it in the "message on the front page" field available in the xtemplate configuration section (the blue field whre you have "Welcome to NCANPHA.org!"): admin->configuration->themes->xtemplate. you can then edit the css file for the theme and make the background white for that message if you do not want to set it off (or set it off more by changing the css).
similarly, i'm not sure i understand your question about "home" since that link can easily be changed in the xtemplate configuration section as well.
Thank you. I should have kno
Thank you. I should have known it was that easy to set the front page. I was searching the backend files.
As for the "home", I'm not sure I'm following you. I can't find a setting for the linksbar anywhere in the xtemplage config section (these are not primary links or secondary links, but the linksbar, instructions to activate here: http://drupal.org/node/view/6758).
Thanks again, I appreciate the response!
JAB*
why use linksbar?
sorry. i've never used the linksbar. xtemplates primary and secondary links fields seem too easy as long as you know the url. unless you plan on letting other users add to the that menu, xtemplate provides the means to do it manually via the gui in the xtemplate configuration section. so if it were me, i'd deactivate the linksbar. then you have complete customization and can add any links, external to the site or internal, as well as any other valid html.
have you tried this?
linksbar dynamically populate
linksbar dynamically populates the links (so no manual setup and maintenance of primary / secondary links)... I just can't figure out how or where it does it since it didn't require any installs...
I found some info in the incl
I found some info in the includes\conf.php file that I thought might help, but it didn't seem to do anything. I deleted my cache and tried in a new browser, to no effect. The code is at the end of the file:
// $custom_links = array(
// "home",
// "journal",
// "articles");
?>
Changed these links to caps (i.e. Home), but it didn't seem to work for me.... still searching.
Are you using an xtemplate driven theme?
If you are using an xtemplate-driven theme it should be easy to change the links' names from the options in the admin panel.
You may also want to try the localization module, but I'm not sure about that.
I'm very confused by this. I
I'm very confused by this. In the xtemplate administration I see the following:
Template Selection (set to default)
Header Settings:
Logo
Primary Links
Secondary Links
Message on Front Page
Search Box
Avatar Settings
That's it. I can't find anything that indicates titles of home pages???
primary links
Can't you add your 'Home' link to the primary or secondary links?
ie:
<a href="/">Home</a> | <a href="somewhere else">Away</a>
/marky
No, I can't. I'm using links
No, I can't. I'm using linksbar, not Primary / Secondary Links. linksbar dynamically populates the links. It did not require any installation, so I had assumed it was a Drupal feature. I had no idea it was black magic...
I don't want to this thread to attack this forum with support questions (since it's not pre-installation anymore), so I'll try a search in the Support forum and ask the question in a more appropriate place.
Thanks,
JAB*
Drupal can take some getting
Drupal can take some getting used to (6+ months for me) and i've felt before that it's too frustrating, too overwhelming, that it doesn't do what i want. Now I'm kinda used to drupal's goods and bads and find it quite versatile for today's web needs. One of the things that it took a while to get is that the look, feel, and functionality of the site was largely resting on themes - and that things can be done there that totally effect the site, but don't rely on changing something deep in the core of drupal. Thus i feel i can hack something together and it's not going to get me into trouble later when a new drupal comes out.
I'm a huge standards kinda guy. xhtml, css, i luv it. So a lot of the themes (well, all of them actually) don't do exactly what I want - there's tables, there's html - not xhtml, stuff like that. It's not earth shattering but i guess i felt that i was more of a novice than this great community of people who designed this brilliant cms. But really it's time and effort to do this stuff and to get exactly what you want it takes effort on your part. You get back what you put into it, Drupal won't just do everything out of the 'box' - but that's good because it's versatile. It probably won't automagically generate what you want to for your 'primary links' but with a few minutes you can easily make your own list of links.
... It took me a while to get that, I feel like an idiot now, I was waiting for something, for someone to give me exactly what i wanted, but what gets lost when one thinks like that is one of the reasons web site design is so appealing - Self expression.