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Here's the basics available in most CMS: Polls/surveys, email forms, blog, newsletter, multilingual, members access, forums, etc
But I have a client that's also after:
1) Facebook style personal home pages (possible) but also including....
2) Ebay type auction system with buy now features
3) Integration of the above into wap mobile phone website that allows payments through phones (Paypal sounds good, not much of a problem there)
4) Internal messaging system
5) wiki for online document collaboration
Wondering if anyone has started on/knows about any of the above features already integrated into a solid CMS such as Joomla/Drupal/etc.
Have a nice day,
Derek
Amnesty Internation, Akamai, Discover magazine, Novell and others are said to use it. I would think if it is flexible enough for those sites it would handle most anything that a "normal" business could throw at it.
For Joomla, you might approximate this with the Community builder extension, auction factory and a wiki extension. I dont have experience with wiki extensions so I cant recommend any. I am not sure what could do no.3 for you. I think you would find yourself somewhat limited with Joomla and end up hacking it quite a bit.
Yep the general consensus so far seems to be Drupal because of the solid architecture. I'm just not sure if it's worth going through the whole hassle of digging into Drupal and coding some of the features separate.... there's going to be lots of custom modules. Honestly this project sounds like one big headache...
My client knows this will be a very large job taking around 4-6 months for professional grade quality and testing... so would like to contribute and bring on an extra guy or two to help sort out the wrinkles on some features.
Do you know of any advantages/disadvantages of either Drupal/Joomla community? Heard Drupal is in transition and busy integrating everything into 6.0.... is support hard to come by?
Have a good one,
Derek
Generally speaking, you can get excellent support for any core features in Drupal. If you're using more complicated, less popular or newer modules, then of course it gets harder. Sometimes, you can pay the maintainer for extra support, but often they have full-time jobs and aren't really looking to pick up extra money. I think that's true of any open source project.
Drupal 6 is a fairly new release and several fundamental modules are still not converted.
There is a growing base of Drupal freelancers who, if they already know the API inside out, can sometimes do amazing things relatively quickly.
One issue that I have about drupal is that every major revision brings API changes (that's basically what defines whether or not it's a major revision) and they come out relatively quickly (officially shoot for a release/year schedule). Many Drupal 5 modules are still in beta and yet we are only six months out from a code freeze on Drupal 7 (actual date will depend on whether or not unit testing is ready for Drupal 7 or not).
I was hoping that with Drupal 6, that will slow down. Don't get me wrong, I think the Drupal 6 is a major improvement (a bigger step than Drupal 5 in many ways), but I would really like to see the APIs (and therefore modules) go obsolete more slowly.
Before you get too far into it, you might want to look at the drupal 7 roadmap... if there were such a thing. See
[groups.drupal.org...]
But notice what Dries Buytaert has on his Drupal 7 timeline:
9. Better internal APIs
10. Better external APIs (import/export, web services)
So I think it's fair to say that, especially with the types of functionality you're looking to build in, there may be some significant coding involved in updating to Drupal 7, if you go that route.
I guess this is a bit of a tangential ramble, but I hope it is relevant to your decision-making process. If so, you might want to check out some of what Dries has to say about the future (he is the maintainer of Drupal with a role somewhat like Linux Torvalds had in the old days of Linux).
[buytaert.net...]
[buytaert.net...]
[drupal.org...]
Alternatively, you could look for a package like Expression Engine which has reasonable licensing fees (a few hundred dollars) and a professional staff who can (I believe) be hired to do programming. You might just ask if they're willing to do a bid (though obviously you're looking at many thousands of dollars here, so it's not fair to ask for a bid unless you have a sizeable budget).
That said, I suspect that the OP would find that EE doesn't come with all of the desired features out of the box. For example, there is no built-in auction system though there may be a module or plugin.
And I don't think the OP will find any CMS with all those features out of the box. It's a pretty good-sized laundry list.
