*** Zen Cart + WordPress + PHPbb integration = Drupal? or Zen Cart + Drupal? **opinions are appreciated.

By tea xpress on 9 Dec 2007 at 14:54 UTC

Hi All.

My website TeaXpress.com is being developed. My idea is to have an online teastore with a community where people can exchange ideas. Before I found Drupal, my plan was to integrate WordPress for blogging tea news and PHPbb for community forum. Would this be too much to maintain? It read that Drupal is very easy to maintain. (at the beginning, I didn't know Drupal has forum, but it obviously b/c I am using it:)) Now that I started ZenCart, but WordPress and PHPbb are not yet done. To all the experts out there, which would be the best choice

A. Keep ZenCart + WordPress +PHPbb
B. Keep ZenCart and add Drupal
C. Start from scatch with Drupal + e-Commerce/UberCart

Is there something could replace both blogging and a bullentine board? such as blog inside a forum?

My developer is very slow and $$ for every little thing, can you recommend any good developer that would get the work done?
It has been a long and frustrating Christmas season I ever had.

Thanks all in advance.
TeaXpress.com

Comments

depends on your needs and your developers abilities

jscoble commented 9 December 2007 at 15:13

I'm sure this is going to be a surprise to you since you posted in the Drupal forums, but I would go with C ;) You can also integrate PHPbb with Drupal if you want more capable forum software than what Drupal offers out of the box.

However, you already have your site up so it may be better for you to continue down the road that you are going.

BTW, I would suggest adding on-hover to your tea images above your navigation links as a visual reinforcement to the user that those are links.

Sorry to hear that this season has been so frustrating for you so far.

Joel

Thank you.

tea xpress commented 9 December 2007 at 21:06

Hi Joe,

thank you for your opinions. I submitted the request. I think the developer contract to some other people who do not pay attention to details. I spent a lot of time and some $$ on Zen Cart and I have to think twice about going Drupal all the way. I don't know, time and efforts seem wasted but in the long run.... is it worth it???

teaxpress.com
for a healthy lifestyle...

I had my company site grow

farrell commented 9 December 2007 at 16:07

I had my company site grow as you describe, first an HTML site with a WordPress blog, then I added phpBB, then I had two WordPress podcast installs... No real e-commerce, but that remains a possibility.

Eventually, I found myself spending a lot of time updating WordPress, WordPress plugins, phpBB -- which was a terrible spam magnet, BTW -- etc. What a lot of work. So, I bit the bullet and ported all of it over to Drupal. I've been a happy camper ever since. Now, I just keep up with Drupal and I'm all done.

--
Farrell Kramer
farrell kramer communications

I had my company site grow

farrell commented 9 December 2007 at 16:08

--
Farrell Kramer
farrell kramer communications

I had my company site grow

farrell commented 9 December 2007 at 16:09

--
Farrell Kramer
farrell kramer communications

I had my company site grow

farrell commented 9 December 2007 at 16:10

--
Farrell Kramer
farrell kramer communications

more info please...

tea xpress commented 9 December 2007 at 21:09

Hi Farrell,

Can you please elaborate on your experience on WordPress and phpBB? I never use them before and do not spend alot of time maintaining them especially I am very busy. Positives and negatives. how much work you spend may be a week take care of your site. My is an ecommerce and expect to be more time required? correct?

Thanks
teaxpress.com
for a healthy lifestyle...

Sorry for the multiple

farrell commented 10 December 2007 at 03:16

Sorry for the multiple responses. I'm not sure what happened.

WordPress was not terrible to update -- and it's very elegant software -- but the third-party plugins that are needed were always being updated and sometimes broke the site. It was difficult to keep track of them all. If I had to spend an hour or two a week updating WordPress, it became a problem as I had grown the site and had 3 WordPress installs going at once.
As far as phpBB, there were not so many updates but when they came they were difficult as I had done a good bit of customization of the forum and the code was not good. The software is very old and they've been working on phpBB version 3 for what seems like years now. The 2 series stuff gets tons of spam and the included captcha does a poor job. I was really not impressed with phpBB.
The main problem is the volume of different apps I had strung together to create the site I wanted was too much. That's why I went with Drupal. One install and that's it.
Hope this helps.

--
Farrell Kramer
farrell kramer communications

Integrating a Forum into your site...

phycel commented 22 March 2008 at 10:18

Since you have Zen Cart so nicely set up already, and it seems you already have wordpress integrated into Zen Cart? I would suggest you download the WP & SMF plugin for wordpress. What this plugin does is integrates Simple Machines Forum into wordpress. Now, I know it seems like it might be a lot of work, but you've already gone this far. At least the wordpress plugin makes things simple and I've heard Simple Machines Forum is not nearly as bad with spam as PHPbb. Here are a few links to help you:

WP & SMF Plugin Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smf-a-simplemachines-bridge/#post...

The Plugin Author's Site: http://www.earthorbit.com/opensource

And the Thread I poked through regarding this plugin and it's development: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=161671.0

Here is a good example (not my site): http://loadedgamer.com/forum/

I think your current Zen Cart site is beautifully done and I hope this information helped you. Good Luck!