I'm currently running a 5000 unique vistors per day site on PostNuke 0.764 and contemplating a move to Zikula (the new version of PostNuke), but I thought I'd check out the competition.

I see there's a migration route from PN and all I really need to move is users (as I don't use much else of it).
I'm using PNphpBB2, so happy to see Drupal has similar and happy to migrate.
I homebrew my news, calendar and some other stuff, so would eventually go Drupal for that.

What I need in addition to the basics are a great eCommerce module (products and subscriptions), a great gallery (facebook style and taggable to events and locations) and a great User Profile/User Homepage module. Any recommendations?

So... should I go with Drupal 5 or 6? I'd sort of assumed when I turned up here earlier today that Drupal 6 would be the obvious choice, but reading around it seems many of the modules haven't been ported to Drupal 6 and one worry is the apparent large changes of the API between Drupal versions as I'll be intending to write some new modules myself.

Comments

dnewkerk’s picture

Definitely go with Drupal 6. Some people say modules for D6 aren't ready/available, but in my experience this is no longer true - every important module I require for a robust Drupal 6 site is available and works great. There might be some more esoteric modules not ported, however at this point if they have not been ported (it has been over a year) then it is unlikely they ever will be (unless someone specifically needs it and puts in any required effort or funds to do it). Some D6 modules are lingering on alpha/beta/rc stages longer than usual for some reason, however they are completely stable in almost every case in my experience.

For eCommerce, the main recommendation usually goes to Ubercart module, which has great features, pretty easy/understandable, and excellent support. The D6 version is beta, but many many sites are using it with no issues. There is also e-Commerce module though many people say it is more difficult to use (though possibly more powerful in some respects), and when I personally looked into it a while back, had very little helpful documentation (may have more now). There are also a variety of other eCommerce related modules for other purposes and cases.

There are a lot of gallery-type modules for Drupal, however I'm not personally a fan of any of them. The most recommended and flexible way to make a gallery in Drupal is to build it yourself using several very powerful components (with which you can make MANY custom features and pages in Drupal): the main elements are CCK module and Views module (2 of the most powerful modules Drupal has). Then for images, Imagefield and Imagecache modules. You'd made a "Photo" CCK type, add an imagefield to it, decide how to show the thumbnails and full size images (using Imagecache), etc. All nodes are taggable by default in Drupal (use the built-in Taxonomy module, creating a free-tagging vocabulary called "Tags" for instance). Location module allows you to easily associate geographic data with a node (add on Gmap module to easily tie in Google Maps to the data). I have a detailed article I'm working on regarding CCK and Views: http://www.davidnewkerk.com/book/18
There are also very helpful video lessons at http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/

For profiles... definitely Drupal can do this. The easiest "out of the box" way without having to understand much is Advanced Profile Kit (it works easiest along with Panels module, however you can use it on the theme layer too without Panels). Personally I just theme the user-profile.tpl.php file that comes with Drupal 6, and also have various Blocks appear on the user's profile page. All kinds of data is available to the user-profile.tpl.php template, you just need to fetch it and print it out. Here's a video that helps explain how to theme user profiles this way. Michelle has a useful reference of social networking related modules you can add. This post on DrupalSN might also be helpful.

You can get both a look at some impressive Drupal-based sites, as well as descriptions on how they were made at http://drupal.org/cases ... and more sites listed at http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites

Hope this helps, and let us know if you have more questions :) Definitely focus on learning about CCK and Views... once you learn them, many other possibilities open up.
Good luck!

dunx’s picture

I was hoping for a detailed answer... and that's what I got. Many thanks. 6 seems the way to go and most of the modules that seem interesting and useful to me seem 6'd, so I think a few more days of reading and then I'll download and have a play.

My only concern. As a I said, this is HitWise award winning site with upward of 20,000 page views per day and 5000 unique visitors per day. Is Drupal man enough for the task?

beate_r’s picture

Hi there,

i am considering a migration away from zikula to drupal (which i do have some experience with...).

To the technical aspects: i want to migrate a small site containing a forum, a few users, some personal messages and some documents, and i would like to migrate all the content into the new site. Has anyone already done something similar?