By Oddish on

We'll soon begin the process of completely rewriting our website and it would be great to be able to build on some already made stable solutions. I'm not sure Drupal will be able to handle our needs.

The site is a large local portal where the main "attraction" is a company directory. Basically, we're a directory/search engine for information about the local businesses. For some, we just display basic info, but many clients have their own presentations which they can update themselves.

Around this "core" is lots of other content such as local news and weather, restaurant menus, image archives, tv guide, etc. etc. And also, the user management will be rather complex. There will be plain visitors who will register to access the forums etc. and also business owners who must be able to also update their own presentation on the site. Those and several more levels of users will be required.

Will Drupal be able to handle "complex" content like this? Is it a complicated process to extend Drupal and build your own modules?

Comments

robertDouglass’s picture

robertDouglass commented

The user management based on roles is a fundamental part of Drupal, so you're ok there.

For all the custom content types you'll have to see if a solution like flexinode will be suitable for you, but it is likely that you'll want to write small modules for each to handle their special needs. Or you might find suitable solutions in existing modules. It depends on what each of the custom types you mentioned need to look like and be able to do.

As for the business directory, the people at CivicActions are devloping exactly that right now. Contact them at CivicActions.com to get the code. There are other ways of approaching the directory as well, but not knowing exactly what you want it is hard to make a recommendation.

Drupal usually has 80% of what you need in cases like this, and there will be some adjusting and extending to do to make it be a perfect fit. That's why it is so fortunate that developing for Drupal is a dream.

- Robert Douglass

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