I'm working for non-profit whose has a very outdated system for tracking donations from its benefactors based on Microsoft Access 2003. They want to move to a web product (it's only used in-house), but I am very hesitant to build a lot from scratch. A technical consultant suggested using Drupal to replace the system, by building around it. I am unsure of this however, as Drupal seems mostly to be for content display only and not ideal for any sort of mathematical operation (such as summing the donations received in a year), reports, etc.
Does anyone have any experience using Drupal in this or a similar maner?
Drupal is very flexible and there are a lot of powerful modules for (almost) anything.
I don't know your requirements, but I will recommend you give a try to this CMS. If your question is about how manipulate maths operation, look https://drupal.org/project/computed_field
But I think your solution can be near to CRM Core module: https://drupal.org/project/crm_core with https://drupal.org/project/crm_core_donation
Related
I am still exploring the topic of migration and would like to know what are the best methods to migrate from a custom written PHP/MySQL system to Drupal 7.
The data that needs to be migrated is in three tables (Journals, Journal Issues and Issue Articles).
The organization publishes several journals, each journal has several issues and each issue has several articles.
This is the data structure:
Journal has: title/description/language/abstract
Issue has : title/journal_id/issue_number/real_issue_number/quarter/year/volume_year/volume_issue_number
article has: title/author/abstract/section/issue_number/pdf_file/featured/tags
Should I use the migration module, the feeds module or should I write my own PHP script to migrate data to a custom created content type ? Any tutorials which describes how to migrate data from a database to Drupal (Not just upgrading).
Thanks!
I think this depends on how good your knowledge of coding in Drupal is; I always write my own solution for an import because I like to have full control over the quality of the incoming data (especially for fields that contain HTML, I like to ensure the code is correct and strip out any tags/attributes I don't want to keep).
Using the migrate module would involve a small learning curve which I don't think is strictly necessary if you're comfortable with creating content in code, although it is an extremely powerful module and I'd recommend reading the documentation to see if it's something you want to use.
Similarly the feeds module will require a small bit of extra reading/learning if you want to use it programatically (see the documentation). But, if you can fully trust that the data you're importing is of a sufficient quality then I think the feeds UI would be the easiest way to get your content in.
I need to develop an e-store application in C#.NET. There are number of open-source packages already available, like nopcommerce, dotnetcart and so on. I went through the source code of some and found them very tedious or to say very deep functional. My requirement is pretty straightforward. Need to have just one level of categorization and a simple and clean front-end. Therefore, i am bit sceptical about using such big solution for a simple e-store.
What do you think ?, should i use the already existing solutions or develop the one accustomed to my requirements.
Use Ecwid. It very simple, free and easy built shopping cart for any site: http://www.ecwid.com
Try to consider Orchard CMS + e-commerce-module.
I hope I'm not using stackoverflow.com in the wrong way: asking this question!
Recently I ventured in to starting my own business to Sell software without realising the terrible implications that come with ecommerce - the only way to buy my software I offer. This would be fine if I was just selling the file downloads and/or shipping...But I'm not! I the hope that it would be easier (and alot cheaper) I am only offering digital downloads!
All this is fine, and I only have one hurdle to overcome - a big hurdle that is.. automating serial key disturbution!
By the way - the reason I'm using Drupal and Ubercart is, I wanted to make my business website look as professional as possible and I saw a CMS as the way to go. I picked drupal because its open source (free), flexible, very search engine freindly and I knew that lots of other sites with the same idea as me used it, among other reasons! AND I picked Ubercart because it seemed like there was more support for it and it seemed more up to date, etc. But I suppose I can turn to drupal ecommerce module if needs be.
Anyway. All I want is to be able to generate a serial key, add it to a MySQL database and sent it to the user via email as soon as I know that the payments gone through sucessfully - how ever they payed!
I've got the script for that!
I just don't know how to use it! How do execute it, when I some how know when the payments gone through? And How do I know the paying customers details like email, name and amount paid, etc...
Any advice or help appriciated...
Thanks in advance
This is can be done with no problems, i want to tell you that Ubercart as a choice is very good , and more organized than ecommerce, just wanted to tell you that so you know you are on a good track.
I hope you are familiar with hooks, and if not , you can understand them easily in no time, in Ubercart there is a hook_order which gives you the ability to add a functionality when the order is being newly added , saved, updated , or any other state , check this link :
http://www.ubercart.org/docs/api/hook_order
I hope that was helpful enough.
I do Drupal for a living and I like the system. However I've always been intrigued by Plone and wanted to learn it well to broad base my knowledge of CMSes in general. I've played around with Plone in the past and was both mesmerized and repulsed by it -- depending on the day.
But then again here is what I saw as the advantages of Plone
Python sweet Python
Built on battle hardened and uber mature Zope 2
Zope 3 style which is now available in Zope 2 also and therefore in Plone
Objects and not SQL
True separation of configuration and content (unlike Drupal where configuration and content is totally mixed up in the database)
Very powerful system to make custom content types (unfortunately not via a UI)
However it surprised me that there was nothing that I could find equivalent to views ( http://drupal.org/project/views ) and that taxonomy (i.e. classification) was not a first class citizen. Every Plone product seemed to take its own approach to taxonomy. All in all, though I loved its extreme and idealistic approach, it always struck me that everything was so darn difficult to accomplish in it.
I've really been hoping for Plone to succeed and every few months will explore its RSS feeds only to go back dejected.
I thought I'd test out Plone 4. The new feature list in Plone 4 was totally underwhelming to me ( http://plone.org/products/plone/features ).
Drupal 7 new features ( http://drupalcode.org/viewvc/drupal/drupal/CHANGELOG.txt?revision=1.373&view=markup) and Wordpress 3 ( http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0 ) seem to have done tons more in their new major releases.
Moreover replacement to Archetypes through Dexterity ( http://plone.org/products/dexterity/documentation/faq/how-is-dexterity-related-to-archetypes/view ) is also a great step forward. So while Plone 4 itself may be an improvement over 3.x is it enough to keep Plone in the reckoning amongst other CMSes?
Which brings me to my question:
Is Plone on a steady decline? Whats the future of Plone? Am I wrong in my assessment that Plone is not adding functionality and features at the rate other top tier CMSes are?
This http://www.google.com/trends?q=plone seems to confirm my fears.
Should I give Plone 4 a try and make it my "second" CMS?
Let me get the bias out of the way first: I'm one of the co-founders of Plone, so make of that what you will. ;)
Plone 4 is in many ways an "intermediary" release — the original plan was to make it into a large release with new UI approach (new layout system Deco), improved type definition system (Dexterity) and improved theming story (currently referred to as XDV, name will probably change).
Along the way, we realized that we needed a smaller release before we did that, so the major improvements got pushed to a new Plone 5 milestone, and Plone 4 was turned into a infrastructure / cleanup type release.
With that goal in mind, the team delivered the fastest Plone yet (it trounces Drupal, Joomla and WordPress for speed), improved a lot of very important infrastructure (files are now stored outside of the database, it uses much less memory than it used to, and scales a lot better to large number of parallel requests).
The innovation is still ongoing, and now that Plone 4 is out, we're fully focused on delivering Plone 5, which should have a lot of the new features and improvements that were originally planned as Plone 4. In the meantime, we have an extremely solid and fast base to work from, and deploy customers on.
You can also make make use of a lot of the Plone 5 tech in Plone 4 already — examples include the aforementioned Dexterity type definition system, the XDV theming system, and several other infrastructure improvements like the Chameleon template language (adds ~50% speedup for most pages).
So, no — we're not adding features at any slower pace — if you look at the source code history and activity instead of Google Trends (which isn't a very useful metric for something as niche as a CMS system), you'll see that there are more active developers and more code improvements than ever before.
Yep Collections do most of what is described by that description of Drupals Views. One thing that collections don't do out of the box is the grouping/taxonomy. There are additional plugins that can help do that such as collective.collection.yearview. Taxonomy options could be stronger but in reality nested collections work for most use cases.
As for the future of plone? Plone's popularity has remained static for the last couple of years as it has gone through it's massive internal restructuring. It's lost developers and gained developers. Compared to the rise Drupal and CMS's in general that may look like decline. The important thing now is that, due to that restructuring, Plone is now very developer friendly. Due to Diazo/XDV which most Plone integrators are switching to, Plone is now very designer friendly. It's also now fast and just as secure and flexible as it always has been. Expect Plone to start getting a lot more outside attention and growth from now on.
As Limi mentioned the mantra has been 'Plone 4 is the evolutionary release, Plone 5 is the revolutionary release'. As DisplacedAussie said, look at 'Collections' in Plone, they are like saved searches and combined with the Collections Portlet are pretty powerful.
Coming up in Plone 5 is the Deco/Tiles system for content editing, this is going to be really pretty amazing, and you can see in initial preview of it here: http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/32696814
Basically the entire page is made up of composite elements, each one is a first class item and addressable with its own URL. They can be dragged about the page on a grid as you see fit.
-Matt
At the company I work for, we have an intranet that provides employees with access to a wide variety of documents. These documents fall into several categories and subcategories, and each of these categories have their own web page. Below is one such page (each of the links shown will link to a similar view for that category):
http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/9800/dmss.jpg
We currently store each document as a file on the web server and hand-code links to these documents whenever we need to add a new document. This is tedious and error-prone, and it also means we lack any sort of security for accessing these documents. I began looking into document management systems (like KnowledgeTree and OpenKM), however, none of these systems seem to provide a categorized view like in the preview above.
My question is ... does anyone know of any Document Management System that allow for the type of flexibility we currently have with hand-coding links to our documents into various webpages (major and minor , while also providing security, ease of use, and (less important) version control? Or do you think I'd be better off developing such a system from scratch?
If you are trying to categorize the files or folders in the document management system, That's not a difficult task. You only need to access to admin panel to maintain the folders or categorize the folders
In Laserfiche, You can easily categorize your folders regarding the departments and can also be subcategorized them
You should look into Alfresco. It's extremely extensible and provides a lot of ways of accessing the repository.
Note: click the "Developers" tab for the community edition.
My question is ... does anyone know of
any Document Management System that
allow for the type of flexibility we
currently have with hand-coding links
to our documents into various webpages
(major and minor , while also
providing security, ease of use, and
(less important) version control?
Or do you think I'd be better off developing such a system from scratch?
Well there are companies that make a living selling doc management software. Anything you can get off the shelf is going to be a huge time saver, and its going to be better than anything you could reasonably develop by hand.
I've used a few systems:
Sharepoint: although I hear some people don't like it, I didn't either ;)
HyperOffice worked really well for my company of around 150 employees and has all the features you describe.
Current company uses Confluence, I like it :) But its probably one of those tools whose pricetag isn't worth it, especially if you're only using a subset of its features like doc management.
I haven't used it, but one guy I know raves about Alfresco, a free and open source doc management system. I looked at its website, seems simple enough to use.
We also faced a similar problem. However version control was more on our priority and we did look into many solutions in and around. We found Globodox extremely easy to install and use and more important the support team was absolutely fantastic
Try Mayan EDMS, it's Django based, and open source, used it as a base and build the custom features you wish on top of it.
Code location: https://gitlab.com/mayan-edms/mayan-edms
Homepage at: http://www.mayan-edms.com
The project is also available via PyPI at: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/mayan-edms/