Hi,

A while back I created a guitar lessons site using PostNuke. I have since learned joomla and built a site for an international organization that had me pushing joomla to its limits to achieve the sort of content organization I wanted. I find myself revisiting my guitar site, which I unfortunately allowed to sit for several years, with no updating. Since I like learning new skills, I thought I would revamp my site and implement it as a drupal site. Here is how I would ideally organize it.

- Categories: there would be categories like scales, chords, and each could have subcategories
- Within categories there would be lessons. Lessons are a self contained unit, which can stand on their own simply as an article, or they can contain one or more exercises, which would include images, audio, video. So, the exercise will be a crucial content type.
- Lessons and exercises would both be searchable
- In additional to being in a category, lessons and exercises are to be tagged, so that when viewing a lesson or exercise, one sees a list of related lessons/exercises. Alternatively, lessons/exercises could be assigned to multiple categories.
- Anonymous users can view lessons/exercises, but have to be logged in the hear audio and see video. Free account will have limited amount of audio/video. Paid accounts have access to everything.

These are the basic requirements. Does this all sound readily doable in drupal or is joomla really a better fit? And tips before I begin? I am really not familiar with how drupal uses taxonomies/vocabularies, and it seems this will be a crucial part of setting up the site as described.

Thanks!

Comments

WorldFallz’s picture

Definitely sounds like stuff right in drupal's wheelhouse. And I can't think of a single instance where joomla would be a better fit for anything in all honesty. Disclaimer: I was initially a joomla user and switched over to drupal over 8 years ago so it's been a long time since I've even looked at joomla.

drupal does have a learning curve, so when folks ask about wordpress vs drupal for different use cases, I have no problem at all recommending wordpress when the needs are simple and wordpress will fill the bill.

I found joomla too difficult to work with and too difficult to customize and extend. Moreover, I really developed a severe dislike for the pay for every little extension model-- at one point it almost seemed as if the free extensions were being built severely limited and buggy just to herd folks to the paid options.

In the end it's all about the right tool for job-- and I just can't imagine joomla ever being the right tool for any job. Drupal is so flexible and powerful there's almost nothing that can't be built with drupal and little to no custom code.

Drupal's extensive taxonomy system is extremely flexible-- you should be able to organize your site as described no problem. Like I said above, it's been a long time since I've even looked at joomla, but compared to the category system I remember in joomla, it's just no comparison.

bhuether’s picture

Thanks, that sounds like a pretty convincing endorsement for drupal! I will jump in and see what I find. Regards