Hi Guys,
Presently i'm involved in one of my client's project. I got confused to take up the right framework for my application requirements. I mentioned my requirements below, guys please guide me on this ..
1. The admin can create n number of colleges. Each college have their own home page, video gallery , photo gallery and contact us and more...
2. The forum will have different layout same like blog will have different layout. And If i want to change the background only for the particular page , that also i need to do from the back-end..
3. If i have category called engineering for this category i need to create a separate layout and theming.
4. And more over i need to play with UI and searching options...
If drupal is not fit for this then which framework i can take over??
please give your ideas!!
Comments
From what I understand of
From what I understand of your requirements, I think that Drupal sounds very reasonable - though I do find your question a bit too wide.
The reasons why I think Drupal is a good option for you are the following:
1. Very flexible management of profiles, roles, and permissions (essential to what you want to achieve)
2. Powerful taxonomy system with no limitation on how many categories and subcategories you can create
3. Multi blogging functionality on the core (if colleges or college members like to have their own blog) and a reasonable forum out of the box
4. Good template and theme system
5. Flexibility in customization using modules such as CCK, Views and Context
Another point you might want to consider is scalability. Your project might grow and you want to be able to be on top of business requirements in the future. For example, Colleges might want extra features in the future such as running their own online courses and discussions or even having their own back-end for managing their interactions with students, clients and sales. With Drupal you can integrate with Moodle (a learning management system), SugarCRM (http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/) and Yahoo Pipes (should you need to run custom RSS syndication).
Finally, with Oracle's new acquisition (Sun) we don't know what will happen with MySQL which is Oracle's competitor. There are quite a few scenarios out there in the web but Drupal 7 - as far as I know - will be supporting at least 4 database systems which means you're not tied to MySQL should you need to migrate in the future.
Finally, you might want to consider Drupal Commons. It's a specific Drupal distribution geared towards profiles and networking.
http://acquia.com/products-services/drupal-commons
http://acquia.com/files/marketing/0041_Drupal_Commons.pdf
I'm also accepting the points
I'm also accepting the points you mentioned. And i need to consider those points too. My present question is how i can implement multi number of colleges. Example If the user is searching for a college in california state. I need to display all the colleges coming under california. Here for each college i need to create the individual home page and the user can select their own background- dolor or image. And i need to provide the information like what courses , contact-us, fee structure , gallery. The above mentioned things should come in individual links.
Like the below:
http://example.com/college/california/state-university,
http://example.com/college/california/state-university/contact-us,
http://example.com/college/california/state-university/courses..
I need to create a new module for this?? or i can use the node with cck is enough??
If the site is growing well in future.. Then it will make any performance problem like taking more time to load??
No you don't need to create a
No you don't need to create a new module.
You need to create your own custom content type called College using the CCK module (http://drupal.org/project/cck). You will need to think carefully what fields College needs to have. For example: Title, Description, Image, Location (location and Gmap module) and so on.
For courses, there are various ways of doing this. You can either create another custom content type. Or you can use the already existent Page content type. You will need to give the right permissions to 'University Admins' to be able to create and manage this content for themselves. For course modules you might want to consider using taxonomy or even the Book content type. Finally, you will probably need to give permissions to University admins to create their own 'university menu' to link their content such as About us, courses, location, contact us etc.
For URL structure you will need to configure the Pathauto module.
Regarding Users: They can upload a thumbnail image anyway by editing their profile once they register. You can further extend profiles using the Profile module (http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/profile) but I don't know how they can select a background colour.
This project sounds like a tremendous task and you will need to think very carefully issues such as Taxonomy and content management (check figure 2 here: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/strategic-content-management/) before you start building it.
Thanks for your reply
Thanks for your reply sp_key.. Yes you are correct the project was too big. and i need to analyze a lot.