Our site is www.bachtrack.com, intended to be a major resource for classical music listeners. Mainly United Kingdom initially, but with plans to spread.
I chose Drupal for several reasons:
- Wealth of modules meaning that lots of the work was already done
- Tight design principles meaning the extensibility works very well and easily.
- Great support from the community
- Highly scalable site seems to be possible with very low investment
Most of the hard work has been done in a single dedicated add-on module, whose database is separate from the main Drupal database (not sure that was a good decision, but it seemed so at the time): bolting that into Drupal in the right places was very straightforward.
The design is very Javascript-heavy, and is thoroughly customised: having already learnt PHP, Javascript, XML, SQL and DOM in order to complete this project, I didn't fancy adding JQuery to the list. A better framework for applications with complex form UIs would be nice, but at least Drupal didn't get in the way of my producing the custom stuff.
DDEV is the official local development tool of Drupal. And like Drupal, DDEV depends on the support of the open source community.
