Drupal, Joomla? Sponsor an Orphan - drupal

I'm trying to find a relatively simple solution to deploy a website that allows someone to select an orphan and donate to that orphan. Each orphan would be a part of a orphanage...
I looked into Drupal and Ubercart but I didn't know enough about it at the time... felt kinda lost. Could someone point in the right direction? I'd like to use an open-source solution and as many pre-built modules as possible.

Definately drupal - you are right when you say drupal is a bit much to take in, but with the right links, it's not so bad
http://diasporan.net/content/drupal-and-ngos-dango-modules-and-install-profile
That's everything you need, all packaged in a nice install profile. An install profile is like a C make file, it "compiles" drupal for you for a specific use case. Google "drupal install profiles" for more info (Hint, if you see pages explaining "Drush make" you're on the right track)

This can be done in both ways.
I would do it with joomla though, in my opinion it is much more powerful than drupal, has a bigger community behind, and there are many free add-ons.
You can use hikashop as your shopping cart solution. It is is simple shopping cart solution that works very well with joomla.
I made this e-shop using joomla & hikashop recently.

Well, I'm sorry but the best way would be simple and fast with Prestashop.
See you!
Note: I like Joomla! and Drupal but when it comes to ecommerce well... Lets hope that soon prestashop can be integrated with joomla and drupal.

You can use drupal because its a very powerful cms.
The best part is that manages the database very effectively so, if in future your data size increases, then you don't have to worry about it.
The installation is very easy. just visit drupal.org.
The community of drupal is very supportive.

Related

Learning management system for/in Drupal

So the idea is simple. I need a learning management system for drupal. Whateve it's a extension or module.
I tried to google it and reached opigno. But it will totally take way to much time to fix it's styles out for 21 century. And also, it's pretty useless. Makes to much problems.
I'd be grateful to any one who will give me any idea!
Thanks,
Kind Regards.
I searched for a school management system module but no result,
If you are not bound to use drupal you may find many plugins in wordpress for the title you mentioned.
you can view the following as an example:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/learnpress/
or this one:
https://themeforest.net/item/lms-learning-management-system-education-lms-wordpress-theme/7867581
and if you forced to find something for drupal I didn't find with my previous search.

LMS with drupal or Joomla?

I will create a LMS site. But I don't know Is it possible in drupal? or in Joomla?
I want only these system core, And I don't need to a portal (I need to some page with my special theme, for admin, teachers and students and I don't need to these CMS pages).
Can I do my idea with Drupal? or with Joomla? Or I must start a new project from base??
(Sorry for my bad English)
Thanks ...
What do you need from the LMS and what CMS features do you need? Drupal or Joomla may be a stretch if you need full SCORM functionality and/or sophisticated LMS features. Moodle may be a better fit in that case.
It's very possible in either Drupal or Joomla. I personally like Drupal more than Joomla, and would encourage you to look in that direction. There is an actual tool called JoomlaLMS, which would probably give you a better out of the box solution, but you will have to shell out quite a bit of cash.
If you're willing to spend quite a bit of time building your own system in Drupal, you could have a very good free solution. You could also end up with a huge mess if you don't know your way around Drupal.
I'd go with Joomla. The reason is that Joomla is a much bigger project with many more people involved, so developers build many more addons, as Jimmy said. I was able to put together an impressive website, www.shattergames.com with a very limited amount of work, just because so much has been done with Joomla. That said, why not just use Moodle?

How can I improve working with Drupal?

For about a year and a half I used Codeigniter to build my sites. Then a client begged me to build theirs in Wordpress. I soon found the joy of using a CMS (if Wordpress can be called that). So for about the last 8 months I have been using Wordpress as much as possible to buld my sites - I made the content fit the design.
Well, I began to grow very tired of the limitations of Wordpress - I needed more control and flexibility over my sites. So, I have recently started using Drupal 7 (not 6.x - I really like the admin panel).
After working with Drupal now for a little under two months - I have begun to feel like I'm using Stone Age Tools to build Space Age equipment.
So my question is: does Drupal get any better? Do you really have to use Views to display your content? Asking for help on the forums is just a shake better than asking a wall. I feel like to do anything requires a module. Why? Is one better off sticking to a framework?
"After working with Drupal now for a little under two months - I have begun to feel like I'm using Stone Age Tools to build Space Age equipment."
Well, my intiial reaction is that this is what you're going to feel like you're doing when you're working with Drupal 7, which isn't out of alpha yet. A good number of the folks who maintain modules haven't started upgrading to 7 yet, and that means that you're missing out on one of the great features of Drupal, which is it's wide and deep space of premade modules.
Try 6.
Do you need to use views to display all content? No, not at all. You can go in, create a new module, and write the sql and presentation that you want. Or you can find a module that will display things for you. Or, depending, you might be able to get the effect you want just by adjusting the theme you're using.
(As a side note, using an admin theme really pretties up the Drupal experience. I'm fond of rootcandy, although Rubik is nice too. Problem with Rubik is that it's not on drupal.org.)
The strength of Drupal is that by using modules, you don't have to re-write code that someone else has written - you can instead take that code and modify it (with hooks) to do what you want. This means you don't have to write an authentication/autherization system again - it's there in core. You don't need to write up openid handlers - it's in core. You don't need to write code to integrate with twitter directly - there's a module that contains an api that helps out. You don't have to write an xmlrpc server from scratch - you can use the services module.
You don't need to write a website from scratch. Instead, you can start with Drupal, add most of the functionality you need, and then spend your time making it fit what your client wants.
Firstly, you can install the Admin module to pretty up Drupal 6 admin. You don't have to use 7. 7 is still in alpha, by the way. Garland sucks, but, Garland is just a theme- its not 'the' admin itself. The Drupal admin can take the form of any Drupal theme, which is useful in its own right, depending on the use-case.
In Drupal, you can create content types clicking through the interface in Drupal 6 or 7. As far as I can see in WP3, you have to script it. A few clicks vs scripting, the choice for me is not hard there. The first way is a lot more efficient, and a task you can hand off to a non coder to get done.
You don't HAVE to use Views to display content.
You -can- use Views to make the display of content easier, by telling Drupal to gather data and provide a Page, Block, or Feed to display . This lets you create specific sections of content for areas of the site. Otherwise, you would have to create a node, and hijack its template, run a direct sql query yourself AND write the pager functions just to show something easy like the latest 10 "Press Releases" content type. Then, if someone added a new field to that content type, you have to update all that SQL code and display code. Views makes your life easier in that respect. In minutes you can flesh out site sections and arrange content in a myriad of ways. In Wordpress, this method of arranging content without functionality of Views is/was a modern nightmare and a reason I do not want to use it at all unless its a blog and nothing more.
The Drupal Support Forum is tricky. Not all modules are as active as say, Views or Pathauto (being two of the most popular modules). However, SO is also at your disposal. I answer a lot of Drupal questions here. The trick to the Forum there is you have to ask it in the right spot. True, sometimes you may have to wait a few days to get an answer, then again no one -owes- you an answer for a free product. Thats the nature of open source.
Every developer has their favorite modules to use with Drupal, and more often than not, its the same 20 or so modules. It depends on what you are doing, what you are trying to implement. It's not that 'everything needs a module' its that Drupal is such a vanilla install because Drupal does not want to assume your purpose nor overwhelm with options. The UX is something they are trying to improve anyway, and popular modules are making their way into core.
Well, I began to grow very tired of
the limitations of Wordpress - I
needed more control and flexibility
over my sites. So... I have recently
started using Drupal 7
Why not go back to CI? Drupal certainly has it's strengths, but I don't think Drupal will give you any more "control and flexibility" than Wordpress.
If the standard modules/plugins, themes/templates, from WP, Drupal, or Joomla, fill your needs, then using a CMS can be a lot faster than building a site from scratch. But, if those CMSs do not fill your needs, you could find yourself "fighting the framework" and never really getting what you want.
You're just coming out from WordPress, which has great support and is relatively easy to extend to overcome what you call its limitations, if you know basic PHP, HTML, CSS & JavaScript. Every framework has its own potential/limitations.
As a user of WordPress my humble opinion is that you should have stayed with it.
As of you last question, It depends, to stick with one and only one framework has its advantages and disadvantages, the best of all is that you get to know it very well and eventually learn how to extended it. The bad part is that very often frameworks lose popularity and you are left to you own without an active user community and support.
Regards.
All of the popular CMS products (I'd maybe add Expression Engine to the mix) are great for 80% of what you want to accomplish and a huge pain to handle the other 20%.
That's just the nature of the beast.
On the plus side, it's OS so there's lots of people hacking away at it just like you which opens up the potential for someone else already having invented the wheel.
And with bulky enterprise CM solutions like SharePoint I find that you have to reverse the equation to 20/80 (ugh!).
If you're discouraged with Drupal and prefer to stick with WP, WordPress has many thousands of plugins, including ones that can overcome the limitations you're running into and make WP behave more like a normal CMS.
Just do a Google search for "top Wordpress CMS plugins." There's a lot of articles out there that can recommend ways to get WP to do exactly what you want.

Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke or something else for a sport club?

I am setting up a web site for a football club and I am wondering which CMS to use.
I am a developer but I am doing this as a favour to a friend and would rather grab something with modules in it (registration, events, calendar, etc.) already. I need to be able to customise it but I had a look around and Wordpress looks like a blogging tool. I am wondering if anyone has experience with the above or any others and if you could shed some light. Thanks
The Major benefit of DotNetNuke is that you will be programming in .Net with all the tools that go with that. And the db is of course, SQL Server.
So if you are a MS guy, then DNN is a good option.
Day Of DotNetNuke is on in Europe this Friday and we will some slides which demonstrate how to use Telerik and sqlDataSource to build modules in minutes. These use Telerik grids to give you CRUD functionality in two simple files. Drop in to Paris if you are free, otherwise, visit the site next week and you can get the slides and some sample code, or else contact me and I will send them to you,
PS. Not sure why, but you will enjoy working on DNN.
good luck and enjoy.
Mark
I can't speak to the current relative merits of the different tools, as it's been a couple of years since I did a comparative evaluation of Drupal, Joomla, WordPress (and 40+ others).
But, I can testify that Drupal would be a good solution for almost any club website.
Out of the box - or with the installation of a commonly used module or three - you could set up:
Recent News
Upcoming events (Calendar)
Blogs (for the club President, Treasurer, other officers, team captains, etc etc)
Media such as podcasts, videos, etc
Of course, all this is optional. There's heaps of documentation online at http://www.drupal.org covering all this kind of thing.
The key point to take away is this: With Drupal, the challenge your friend will face with the website is "what to say" not "How to make it work".
It depends how well-versed you are in a particular CMS for example Joomal or Drupal or some other. If you can customize the things easily and be able to modify the CMS as per your needs, you should go with that one as both Joomla and Drupal have big list of extensions to their name. You should have advanced programming concepts especially OOP when it comes to customizing the CMS. The other option is to create everything from scratch on your own. In the end, I would prefer Joomla over Drupal.
If you have no experience at all with any CMS, I suggest you Joomla to start with. It is easier to learn and probably enough to manage a football club sites. It is also easier setting a Calendar, Event System and Photo Gallery. Drupal is more flexible, it has great user permission control, but it is a bit more complex.
Liferay Portal also has the features you need.
Quick and easy to set up with registration, Calendar ootb. it will be easy for your friend to admin in the future

Drupal vs OSCommerce

I'm a die hard Drupal fanatic, but Drupal is more of a CMS and OSCommerce is more of a Online Shop application. Question is, should I stick with Drupul for my next online shop project, or dare to take on OSCommerce?
Tough to answer without knowing more. Drupal is not very strong if all you're doing is building [x], where [x] is an online store, blog, forum, rss aggregation site, etc. We recently retooled our company store in Drupal using the Ubercart plugin suite, though, and were able to exercise a lot of control over the final results -- and more importantly, intgrate it better with the rest of our site's content.
That's where the real win is -- if you have lots of existing content and/or community, and you want that integrated smoothly with your store. We can do things like auto-suggest products from the store that match the tags on the articles a user is reading, give people access to private forums on our main site based on purchases they make in the store, etc.
If you aren't already an old hand with Drupal, and you don't need that kind of connection, it's probably better to go with a dedicated solution.
(Random notes: Article about putting up the store, podcast about same)
Last autumn, i created several online-shops at a time using Ubercart. There were issues that were hard to solve (e.g. shaping the checkout-view), but in general, it was a good experience, mainly because you have all advantages Drupal has to offer, for example, products are nodes, and the way you present them can be tweaked using all the tons of existing Drupal modules.
I used OSCommerce once, and I nearly went mad adjusting the look as the customer wanted it. So my experience on OSCommerce is pretty bad, and i strongly reommend using Drupal.
If you're going to just create a plain store, without content integration, like Eaton suggests, you'd better go with a dedicated ecommerce solution.
This being said, if you decide to miss on the "extras" coming from using an integrated CMS/ecommerce solution like Drupal+eCommerce or Drupal+Übercart, you should probably not be using osCommerce anyway, but rather look at something with a different code base, like Magento or ZenCart (which derived from osCommerce originally).
If you chose the Magento route, specifically, you will find it is still possible to add Drupal in the mix afterwards if needed, thanks to an existing connector.
OSCommerce may be a practical solution but are you willing to maintain two code bases in the future? Your client will expect ongoing support and you'll need to be proficient in both Drupal and OSCommerce.
I would stick with Drupal if it does what you need. You'll spend less time fixing problems.
I'd stick with Drupal. In OS Commerce installing a module involves following 10 pages of instructions (e.g. insert this code in line 87 in file A, insert this code in line 192 in file B), in Drupal you can upload the module, activate and it works. (Sure you might then need to modify the settings, but most Drupal modules provide an intuitive online interface to do that in.
As you can imagine, once you've installed a few OS Commerce modules, line 87 might be line 104 so the instructions get harder and harder to follow.
I learnt OS Commerce first, then switched to Drupal and found Drupal heavenly to work with in comparison! It also has better SEO, is easier to edit and easier to theme.

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