I have some questions about installing and building a website community with drupal. I've done a few sites using Joomla and I like it but I'm taking on a much larger task and I wanted the opinions of the users here.

We're completely re-vamping the site www.Philosophy.org and here are my concerns and questions:

1. Philosophy.org sells books to the public currently and sells them in many different countries. It's not currently user friendly and we want to make it better. With this, we have to have a store integrated within the site that can allow for automated check out for those customers that are out of the country. Preferabl we'd like the shipping charges (in respect to weight) for each of our books to be calculated automatically to be shipped to other countries. Is there a module in Drupal that can support this?

2. The very reason I'm looking at Drupal is because we want to build a community. We want to take the existing site and information and transform into a site that allows for users to become members and to join in community discussions through blogging and Forums. With this in mind, when a user registers with our site we'd like them to be able to enter their mailing address and other information for the purposes of ordering online books and such. Having a database of addresses is important for the purpose of physical mailings and the shipping of books and media. Does anyone here have any suggestions on this?

3. Next question is where to start. What theme to choose in order to make it all come together so it's search engine friendly with search engine friendly urls. I've done some reading in the handbooks available for Drupal and currently I've installed the phptemplate engine and the standard box-grey them template. Is this a good place to start?

4. If you browse through the current site, you'll see there are articles and images of artwork with descriptions. We'd like to do our best to maintain all of this. Does anyone have any suggestions?

5. There is a good possibility that we will want this site to be displayed in several differnt languages due to the large customer base in different countries. I this possible with Drupal?

I appreciate any of you taking the time to review this post and your comments and suggestions are appreciated. Our goal is not bells and whistles, but a nice looking site that is easily navigated for our users. Our users may include yourself should you be interested in the science of man and the living philosophy of Walter and Lao Russell. With that in mind, I welcome any suggestions for this undertaking. This is a big step for our organization as the site has been around for years. However, we believe it's time to change and I'm excited to have the opportunity to bring these changes about.

Once you've looked at the current site, please offer any information you can as far as suggestions. I'm much more familiar with Joomla (mambo) so this is a learning experience for myself as well.

Thank You,

Justin

Comments

tldagent’s picture

I forgot. The store portion of the website we want to provide downloads of ebooks at a discounted rate and also mp3 files. All of which can be purchased via the store.

I'm sure I'm going to have many more questions so please bear with me.

One other thing... I like the way that an email is sent to me when using vbulletin or phpbb when a response is made. Is there any way to integrate VB into the Drupal site. Joomla has a nice feature where you can integrate SMF forum into the site. I also notice that there is no option for printer friendly version or the option to moderated and edit posts within this forum.

Thanks once again!

q0rban’s picture

Welcome to the community!

I forgot. The store portion of the website we want to provide downloads of ebooks at a discounted rate and also mp3 files. All of which can be purchased via the store.

The e-Commerce module will do you well, as well as the audio module for MP3's... e-Commerce can turn any node into a product, whether it be a tangible item (such as a book) or a file (an e-book or MP3).

One other thing... I like the way that an email is sent to me when using vbulletin or phpbb when a response is made. Is there any way to integrate VB into the Drupal site. Joomla has a nice feature where you can integrate SMF forum into the site. I also notice that there is no option for printer friendly version or the option to moderated and edit posts within this forum.

This is a huge discussion, as you will see if you do a search... There is a phpBB module that will allow you to integrate phpBB into drupal, however if all you want is emails when a response is made, then i believe the subscriptions module is what you are looking for. Also check out the UIE Forum Module as well..

Also, I'm not sure if you were referring to drupal not having printer friendly versions, but there are modules that do this as well.

Cheers!

tldagent’s picture

Thank you for your response. Much appreciated!