I have worked on websites before and always hand coded in each. But as the size of the website grew, it really became difficult to manage them. Our is a college fest website which has a number of online games (like online trading, woodstock , forex and several online quizzes ) . This year we are thinking of migrating to Drupal for this website. Would it be a good choice ?
Drupal will do a fine job of managing users and associated information about users. It will create a framework that you can leverage to integrate your games into the system.
However, the games themselves will likely need to be translated into using the Drupal API, which isn't trivial. Drupal's learning curve can be steep, particularly if you have your own style of doing things.
Having said that, Drupal is extremely flexible and is more aptly called a Web Framework than a Content Management System.
I suggest you create a test version of your site on a local install and see how it feels to try and integrate one of your existing games into the Drupal framework. You'll know quickly if you like it or not.
Drupal is flexible enough to be used for any kind of website, but it's primary focus is around content-centric social networking or community sites. It works great for content pages, blog posts, products, etc. If you are building more of an "application" (ie, a web email client, web-based games, etc),you will have more work to do, to work to customize it.
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I have been planning a little side project of mine for a while now. Since the beginning I had planed on writing a CRUD application from scratch myself. Now after having a little more experience with web programming I think I would save myself a ton of time by using a CMS but being unfamiliar with these systems I do not know if I can do what I need to.
Users will create a profile.
Users will upload images.
Some users will be selling their products, others will be buying them. I will take a percentage. Think ebay without bidding.
Many javascript and php features such as image rotators and an app so users can crop their photos.
Will be integrating Facebook API.
Main reason I am considering a CMS is not to save time, but to make a safer website. I am not experienced with eCommerce and do not want to put my users at risk. Everything else mentioned I can and have done.
Use CMS like Drupal or just start from scratch?
Most of the CMS have the basic functionality you've mentioned in 1,2 and 5.
You'll have to write your own extensions for 3 and 4, or search for existing one that fits you.
Writing an extension for CMS will take less time than writing entire CMS from scratch.
If you want safe and stable code, then it's better to use existing CMS.
I agree with w3b4 that an open source CMS will save you time and give you major security and support advantages.
My experience of open source CMSs only extends to WordPress. I am sure you could make it do all the things you want with a bit of work, but my gut feel is that it might not be the best platform to start out with if you main requirement is buying and selling.
However before you strike it off your list, check out the wp-ecommerce plugin and its various add-ons. This product has developed a lot in recent years and might offer what you need out of the box.
There are tons of Drupal tutorials out there - theming, modules, database interaction, taxonomy, etc. etc. Most that I find are extremely in-depth, but none give a big-picture, site-level overview.
Are there any good tutorials (videos and/or text-based) that show the creation of a simple website, with a simple administrative section? Not ridiculous reams of configuration, or complex, arcane modules...just a simple website with basic pages (i.e. about us, people, news, etc.) that are admin-configurable, and that doesn't look like the default Drupal install.
Obviously to be an effective Drupal dev, I would need to learn these ins and outs, and I certainly plan to. What I need right now though is enough of an overview to give a presentation on Drupal in several days to non-technical people on how we can use Drupal to architect their website. I've already purchased Pro Drupal 7 Development, and have perused the Drupal API docs and tutorials on their website, but these are all too micro - where's the macro?
Thanks.
Maybe the book Using Drupal is a good start for you. It's less about "How does this dark corner of the API work?" but more about tasks you need to accomplish when building a certain type of site (a blog, a wiki, an online store...).
To get you started....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmRW7FALA88
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT_TZEQEm5c
Creating a Content Type
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElXXz9-bxJc
I need to create a blog for my student organization at my university, and we have access to a folder on the school's AFS system. We would like to install a CMS such as WordPress or Drupal and then interface with that via a blogging client to streamline updating the website. We can My only experience with any CMS is developing an Android app that connects to a Drupal powered blog, so I'm familiar with some of its features.
Any thoughts on the best way to go about creating this blog?
Drupal has 2 core modules that can help you with this, Blog and Blog API. Using both of these modules, you will be able to update blogs on your Drupal site through a blogging client.
Another Drupal user has created a video about blogging with Drupal's Blog and Blog API which you can see HERE.
"Best" is always super subjective.
If what you want is a standard, robust blog functionality quickly with minimal learning curve, you want Word Press. If what you want is a flexible, robust blog functionality with room to scale out and add more functionality over time you might want to make the larger and slower investment of going with Drupal.
Speaking as a Drupal Developer myself, I would reach for Drupal because I favor building with future flexibility in mind, but then I've already defeated the learning curve.
I know this question has been tossed around by many developers and designers. I just got finished with my companies intranet site using joomla 1.5 with a custom bulit template and modifying almost everything in joomla. It got me thinking if I should be using an enterprise CMS instead of an free open source CMS. I almost went with wordpress, but the company wanted joomla for there site. It was a great for me to jump into another CMS and learn, but is there a better CMS out there that meant for intranet or does it really matter at all?
Try OpenAtrium, its free.
http://www.openatrium.com
If you're planning an intranet project using a CMS, then you'll need to clarify a couple of requirements before choosing the right one. I have a blog post with some simple choices for choosing a cms for an intranet, more specifically on collaboration and community features. But other more basic requirements are:
Is there a technology stack that the organization prefers/uses? Does it need to be on-premise or cloud based? This will filter down the candidates
Is the Intranet for just posting read-only notices and information, or are community features (groups, lists, news feeds, etc)
Does the Intranet require SSO so that organization members can seamlessly interact with content based on their identity?
What sort of budget is available for the Intranet? All CMS installs have a cost, even the ones without any subscription cost.
Is document and file management an important requirement?
Are customizations needed for any specific Intranet functionality or connectivity to other systems?
Wordpress will do a simple intranet well, but will start to become more work if you start getting complex requirements around authentications, groups and social functionality. If on the LAMP stack and looking for more complex requirements, look at Drupal or Joomla. On the Windows/.NET side there have been suggestions in this answer already - the choices span from full commercial answers such as Sharepoint to those available open source and commercially licensed like Dnn.
Nowadays everything is called a CMS - tools to maintain websites, advanced portals, wiki's, and so on. The requirements for a "CMS" are drastically different for intranets and public websites, however.
Intranets usually have a high level of interaction, lot's of user generated content, different content types, and so on. More users need to be able to login to the system (basically everyone, not just the content editors) with different levels of authorization and different roles in general. Collaboration in general is much more important than with an average "public" CMS based website.
Furthermore you will usually want different types of plugins. Google analytics and SEO are much less important, you'd be more interested in some active user plugin, recent publications, integration with other internal tools (i.e. project management) and possibly exposing other datasources (databases, telephone directories, filesystems with internal documents), and so on.
In my personal experience, Plone is a good choice. It provides most of the above out of the box or through existing extensions and it has excellent integration possibilities with external systems. Cyn.in also provides a somewhat completer plone based solution.
If Plone's too much for you, you could consider some wiki-like system, such as TWiki or MediaWiki
As others have said, it will depend on your requirements.
If you are looking for something more in the enterprise space, then elcomCMS might be a good fit - it's .NET based though (not sure if that rules it out in your case), but has an API and other dev considerations.
Pretty strong as both a web CMS and an intranet.
http://www.elcomcms.com/Product/elcomCMS-Overview/Intranets
I have user long time drupal, but now I switching to WordPress it's much easier, if you don't want to create a community or something like this.
I work at a non profit and we are looking for a web solution to do the following:
External facing web site
Internal posting board for news, updates, pictures
Entitlements around user content
One of the folks at the non profit is a mac person and suggests using iweb and mobileme for this functionality. i have no expereince with these tools but it seems like the following are more appropriate:
TikiWiki: http://info.tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php
Drupal: http://drupal.org/
Joomla: http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla.html
i am a windows dot net guys so i also would prefer some asp.net solution here but i want to avoid getting religious here as any solution that does the job should be fine.
my question is, are there any thing to be concerned about with using the iWeb and mobileme solutions or any brick walls we are going to run into.
Also, are there PC based solution that will allow you to use these tools or does everyone need a mac?
This is only a partial answer to a multi-part question, but:
Drupal and Joomla are platform-independent. The software itself runs on PHP (presumably on a server, rather than a workstation), but you interact with the systems via a web interface. Drupal in particular lets you choose from many different editing options, via it's Wysiwyg module.
Personally, I think Drupal is an outstanding choice for nonprofit org (this being my own background) that have tech-skilled staff, and Joomla is an outstanding fit for nonprofits that don't have much in-house web expertise.
As for iWeb and MobileMe:
Compare them to Adobe Contribute. They're good software for what they do, but building organizational websites is not what they do.
What you've got is basically a souped-up MS Word that writes W3C compliant HTML. Things like members-only content, interactivity, etc are going to be pretty difficult to manage, and you'll be looking for another solution soon anyway if your site gets larger than a few dozen pages.
In short - avoid iWeb and MobileMe for this type of implementation. You may have a "Mac person" in the office (for now), but these products are designed more for individual/home use and not businesses/organizations. Eventually you'll run into any number of "brick walls".
A few other options (amongst many) if you don't have a web-designer on staff and want a hosted solution would be to look at Wordpress or Squarespace.
Thanks