We want to create an ethnic internet portal similar to Yahoo or MSN but much less complex. We are open to any type of open source product and/or paid components-modules.

I am talking about following features:

- E-mail accounts to public
- Dating/matching services
- Real estate services
- Car dealership services
- Blog
- Forum
- Chat
- Auctions
- Online articles, type of an online magazine
- Directories - categories, subcategories, sub-sub categories for companies (such as Yahoo Company Directories)
- Classifieds
- E-commerce - we want to be selling products such as t-shirts, mugs, pens, etc. with our logo
- Banners, advertising management with reports and tracking
- SMS services

The platfrom must have the ability to be fully customizable in the front-end area (website look and layout) so we can create a well layed out site with great graphics. We can not accept the looks of most of the portal sites we have seen built based on the open source platforms. I do not understand if that is caused by the limitation of the plaftorms or by simply people not caring about the look of the sites. Please explain.

Which platform would be suitable, the most flexible, stable and expandable for this type of project?

Please list them or at least point me in the right direction.

Thank you very much.

Comments

nsk’s picture

if you change the looks, you will have to do some extra work whenever you upgrade Drupal and check for changes in theme system etc. This is one reason why I keep Drupal's default theme with only a few changes. The other reason is that I suck at design (I can write CSS, but I can't choose balanced colours etc!).

For e-commerce you can use cafepress.com.

--
NSK, Founder of the Wikinerds Community. See my Drupal site, the Wikinerds Portal.

Dries’s picture

It's a big site you're trying to create; clearly, you'll have to invest some time and money to pull this off. I estimate that Drupal does 60% of what you describe. I believe Drupal is a suitable platform to create such a website but it will require planning, research, and implementation work.

Whether Drupal will withstand the load depends on the traffic your site gets, and the server infrastructure you have in place. We can't answer that question unless you provide more details. The best answer is to do some load testing with a representative (yet fake) workload.

damianlr’s picture

The trafic is going to be probably moderate - up to 100'000 hits a day (?)

We will have the necessary server resources so that is not a problem.
I just read Drupal is withstanding 400'000 hits a day at LinuxJournal.com

Seem like Drupal is a very flexible system to be customized in both the back and the front end (the look of the site). Am I correct?

Also, the site will be in an european language and that might be the problem. I am looking at Joomla but seem Drupal is more powerful system. I do not care for the ease of installation as I won't be the one to do it. I care for flexibility and ease of customization as we will require lots of it.

Just a quick question, does anyone knows or guesses what CMS Yahoo uses?

damianlr’s picture

One more question:

Can you build (of course with customization) sites like the using Drupal or should I be looking at some other solutions?

http://www.gery.pl/

http://www.gazeta.pl/

http://www.wp.pl