By superdne@yahoo.com on

I'm a business analyst at Compumentor, a nonprofit technology company. We are looking for a Content Management System, and I've been charged with researching the field and make a recommendation. To accomplish this, I've developed high level requirements and am attempting to match about 18 products against this list. We are interested in commercial as well as open source solutions.

I have reviewed the available information on this site, but I'm still coming up short, and need many high level questions answered, so I'll post them here, and hope for the best. I'm not technically competent enough to install drupal myself and try to figure this stuff out.

Here are the questions. Thanks in advance to anyone who can answer any of them.

Content Creation:
1. is there an integrated editor for creating content (eg, articles, lists, etc)?
2. is it wysiwig?
3. does it allow the usual html formatting
4. does it enforce valid html, and what does it do with invalid html?
5. does it follow the W3C guidelines for accessibility for those with disabilities
6. can it be safely and easily used by people with no html skills?
Separation of Conent and Presentation
7. drupal uses php templates, but most of the sites I've seen look quite similar; can we design our own templates from the ground up? could we recreate www.techsoup.org exactly as it is, in drupal?
8. does drupal support CSS?
9. what about XSLT?
Metadata
10. does drupal allow us to create our own taxonomy?
11. how configurable is that?
12. is the taxonomy strictly enforced, once established? or are categories, keywords, etc, loosely defined?
Workflow
11. are there any workflow features? what are they?
Publishing
12. drupal appears to be strictly dynamic, is that so? does drupal support batch (so called 'baking') publishing as well?
13. can multiple independent sites be managed from one instance of drupal?
Presentation
14. drupal handles the final presentation of sites, as far as I can tell, so it doesn't require an independent application server. right?
15. can drupal output content to formats other than html, such as mobile devices, pdf, print, and cd?

Comments

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

1. is there an integrated editor for creating content (eg, articles, lists, etc)?

There is a htmlarea module on the d/l page.

Separation of Conent and Presentation
7. drupal uses php templates, but most of the sites I've seen look quite similar; can we design our own templates from the ground up? could we recreate www.techsoup.org exactly as it is, in drupal?

Would be possible, yes (at least the frontpage, did not check further). You'd need to spend some work, however.

8. does drupal support CSS?

As much as you like.

9. what about XSLT?

Not yet, IIRC.

Metadata
10. does drupal allow us to create our own taxonomy?

Sure.

11. how configurable is that?

Very.

12. is the taxonomy strictly enforced, once established? or are categories, keywords, etc, loosely defined?

I am afraid I don't get your question. You can choose if the user has to or is allowed to attach a term from a certain vocabulary to a newly created node.

Workflow
11. are there any workflow features? what are they?

We have a simple queue module that comes wioth the standard distro. I created a workflow module that extednds it a bit, but needs more work.

Publishing
12. drupal appears to be strictly dynamic, is that so? does drupal support batch (so called 'baking') publishing as well?

Please rephrase your question.

13. can multiple independent sites be managed from one instance of drupal?

Yes.

Presentation
14. drupal handles the final presentation of sites, as far as I can tell, so it doesn't require an independent application server. right?

You need a web server such as Apache and a database such as MySQLor postgreSQL.

15. can drupal output content to formats other than html, such as mobile devices, pdf, print, and cd?

There is a very simple pdfview module, but you are mostly on your own.

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superdne@yahoo.com’s picture

superdne@yahoo.com commented

Thanks very much, killes. This is very helpful.

About 11. "workflow features", is there more information available? Are you talking about http://drupal.org/node/view/304?

About 12. "is the taxonomy strictly enforced...", it looks like you interpreted my question correctly. We want the system to prevent users from using their own taxonomy at whim, so it must enforce the use of the existing taxonomy.

About 12 (and now I see my numbering mistake). "drupal appears to be strictly dynamic...". There are three ways to publish:
a. "fried" - the users browser requests a page, the CMS/App Serv build the pages on-the-fly, and send them to the browser. More personalization, lower performance.
b. "baked" - the CMS outputs, on a regular basis, pages as flat files. The users browser requests a page, and the webserver sends the flat versions. Better performance, less personalization.
c. a hybrid of the two. The system allows the admins to configure which pages get 'baked' and which get 'fried'.
Which method does Drupal use?

About 14, "application server...", http://drupal.org/node/view/2 says Drupal works with IIS and MS SQL. Have you found that to be inaccurate? But what I really mean is - does Drupal serve the pages to the user's browser, or does Drupal format the content and expect to send it to another application for presentation?

Thanks very much, killes.

Boris Mann _Old Blogger.com Account_’s picture

Boris Mann _Old Blogger.com Account_ commented

12. Drupal serves all content dynamically for logged-in users (fried). You can enable caching for anonymous users -- that is, the page is "fried" and the anonymous user is served the "baked" version.

14. Drupal is a PHP-based application that needs a webserver (such as IIS or Apache) to do the HTTP transport. That being said, it is the Drupal application that creates/sends all the pages. I think you might be confused about the definition of "AppServer" -- ask more questions if this is still unclear.

Also, just some more info about the templating system. Basically, with a little knowledge of PHP, it is fairly easy to make Drupal look however you want. Some people are more comfortable building table-based layouts, while others build fully table-less layouts, using CSS to control presentation and positioning.

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Boris Mann

superdne@yahoo.com’s picture

superdne@yahoo.com commented

Thanks bmann.

12. Understood. Thanks
14. I get confused; I live in this shadowy world between technical and business people, sometimes it gets quite dark here. But you've answered my question.

And thanks for the templating info.

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

11: Yes
12: You get what you want. Many people would appreciate it if we would offer a more flexible solution, but we do not have this atm.
12: As bmann says: We have a caching system that is mainly used for anonymous users. It is said to be quite good. The cache is stored in the database, not in flat files.
14: IIS and MSSQL probably work, I simply haven't tried them (and would not want to)

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bertboerland’s picture

bertboerland commented

you can try out admin interface of dozens of oss cms-es at opensourcecms.org. look around but dont be fooled by nice looking admin icons alone. speed, flexibility, the community etc are even more important and thats why most of the people here have choosen drupal :-)

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groets

bertb

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bert boerland