I create online communities.

I've used many different CMSs in the past. To date my favourite has been Postnuke.

I've had a pretty extensive look at Drupal and I like what I see so far.

I want a robust and flexible CMS that I can mould to suit the specific requirements of each site... without having to spend too much time on the nitty gritty, allowing for more time on creativity.

Before I jump straight into the deep end I need to know;

1.) How active the developer community is. Being part of an active community is a vital factor for me.

2.) How easy is to tweak things such as adding or removing steps to workflow, i.e. allowing users to post news immediately without clicking 'preview' first etc.

3.) How easy is it to pull apart the template and create something new and wonderful?

I would appreciate any extra comments from people.

I'm looking to develop a couple of online communities, I love the idea of giving users their own blog page with their account ID.

Forum, Calendar, News, Polls & Gallery all need to be robust and customisable.

So far I have established the following (fill me in if you can)

Forum: Uses an inbuilt forum (the one we're using now!)
Calendar: Has an integrated module(s)?
Gallery: I notice there is an integration module for memento's gallery which will be great.

This is one of the most impressive drupal sites I've seen to date:
http://www.terminus1525.ca

I would be interested in seeing any other strong community sites using drupal.

Cheers
Michael Watt
Director Evermedia

Comments

ToddZ-1’s picture

This is one of the most impressive drupal sites I've seen to date:
http://www.terminus1525.ca

Holy wow -- are you sure that's a Drupal site?

venkat-rk’s picture

It is. You will find it referenced in the showcase section of the handbook.

Evermedia, sorry I can't answer your question.

Evermedia’s picture

Yes, I came across it in my research. Most of the funky components are done in flash, but its still an excellent example.

sepeck’s picture

By the same folks http://zimmertwins.com/

other sites, http://evolt.org/ http://www.theonion.com/content/index http://gallery.menalto.com/

So.....
1) very active. Anyone can contribute and it is a serious meritocracy. The new menu module maintainer for core is less then 4 months member, but he came in submitting code and patches like fire.
2) http://drupal.org/node/29084, there are other ways to intercept things. While not a developer myself, they are all going bonkers over the forms api changes and modules for the forth coming 4.7.
3) We have 3 template engines available and direct php coded themes. Your choice. The favorite and new core theme engine for 4.7 will be phpTemplate and you can pretty much do whatever you want. Michael Angeles has some recent blog posts that touch on this in a fancy eye candy way.
http://urlgreyhot.com/personal/weblog/drupal_tip_1_inserting_blocks_into...
http://urlgreyhot.com/personal/weblog/drupal_tip_2_sprinkling_ads_throug...
I do this as a hobby and came up with this template in a much simpler presentation http://www.blkmtn.org/node/232 for my site (css issues but it;s a hobby to learn :)

We have three different image type modules to choose from and flexinode where you can build your own custom nodes. Depending on what you want, they may not be sufficient for your needs. This is our weakest and strongest area depending on what you want. It's posible, but may not do what you want. You'll have to be more specific.

Forums can have modules that add features and capabilities.

Events module for scheduling things (contrib) and archive is the built in module for historical posts. Be nice if there was something stronger. There are some old alterntives floating around but you'd have to ask on the development list.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

flufftronix’s picture

1) I'm not a developer, but I used PostNuke for a few years and I've used Drupal for a few now as well, and Drupal seems to be a lot more active. Dev's listen to user requests and generate code that's useful for the community on the whole because there's so much crossover between dev's and standard users. Little tweaks or code snippets that prove useful are valued, and creates a place for even someone like me who barely knows any PHP to at least contribute in small ways.

2) Well, your example is really easy to do. Some contrib modules make it a little difficult, but from my experience everything in core that could be simplified, someone usually eventually releases a module or patch to do it (I'm thinking now of logintoboggan, and some hacks to user.module which allow end users to define their password without email use at all, which is pretty contrary to how registration was intended to work but doable nonetheless).

3) This is the most flexible CMS I've ever used, with Xaraya coming in second. Though I like Drupal a lot more; it really is [or at the least is in planning to be] everything I always wished postnuke and its forks would be.

robertDouglass’s picture

Hi Michael,

The Drupal developer community is more active than people realize. How can you see? Check this out:

http://drupal.org/cvs

This is a list of CVS messages. Please scroll through the pages until you start seeing the previous day's commits. So far it is 10:00AM CET in the morning, January 6, and there have been 37 commits from 11 different developers.

Beyond that, Drupal is very active in terms of people getting together and doing things, in person. Check out the list of topics that we'll be discussing at the upcoming conference in Vancouver:

http://scratch.blkmtn.org/index.php?q=flexinode/table/1

You asked:

2.) How easy is to tweak things such as adding or removing steps to workflow, i.e. allowing users to post news immediately without clicking 'preview' first etc.

You can change the 'preview' option in Drupal configuration. When you talk about workflow, this requires more specific information. Basically everything in Drupal happens on a well-defined series of hooks that get fired at known times. Most of them are open, in some way, to interaction from module developers. In most cases, you'll be able to write a hook in a module, react to the workflow events that you're interested, and influence the outcome however you like.

- Robert Douglass

-----
My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress

imerlin’s picture

I for one used to code alot in PHP but got really sick and tired of rewriting the same thing for each site and got thinking of making my own CMS.

I soon realized that there alot of open source CMS that are really good and I don't see any reason to reinvent the wheel (as long as it's round).

I took a look at few systems.

Typo3: While incredibly flexible way too complicated and templating is way too complicated for designers to use. Has a very nice plugin directory but the core is hard to update. Basicly a good system but too complicated imho.

Mambo: Actually the first system I started using due to simple interface and a pretty default template. Very quickly became slow on my server and when I looked at the code I stopped using it (no offense to mambo contributors).

Drupal: The code is clean, the speed is impressive and the community is very active. The one thing that finally hooked me was being able to share the codebase between multiple sites and yet have different databases for each site. There are alot of nice modules and the gallery2 integration is very nice to have (although I'd like to see the menu integration that used to be in gallery2 beta)

But back on subject...

1: The community is very active. I'm always seeing new modules and the core is also very interesting.
2: Posters can easilly post without previewing although I recommend doing so.
3: Reading the handbook on PHPtemplate you'll soon find out that making a template is very easy. I made one few days ago although still working on it... it's alot easier than with most systems.

I still haven't written anything for Drupal (or in PHP the last couple of years for that matter) but the day will come :)