Drupal for DummiesIs Drupal right for me?
Hi,
I bought the book and in the middle of reading it to try and learn Drupal. It has been a great read so far so thank you for your effort.
What I'm trying to do right now is to figure out if Drupal is a good tool to try to implement what I want or maybe I should go to something more custom, like Ruby on Rails.
I'm into martial arts and trying to design a site that is essentially a community of martial artists. Here is what I want the site to do:
- Members can create accounts.
- Each member gets a home page inside the community they can customize to a certain extent.
- Members are able to dynamically create unlimited number of pages inside their homepage, these pages represent martial art techniques they invented which has text, pictures and possibly youTube videos.
- Members can assign categories for each page.
- A central search engine for the site that can search by title, key word and/or category of all pages that were posted by all members of the community.
Is Drupal right for me? if so, how well would it scale? or is this too complex for Drupal and I'm wasting my time?
Advanced Search
Check out the Acquia Search function, available with the Acquia installation. http://acquia.com/downloads
It provides an advanced search. I think you have to enable the advanced search permissions for users though.
www.radarearth.com
Tough question. I think I can
Tough question. I think I can say "yes" to everything, if you are comfortable giving your users that level of freedom. You can do all of this with Drupal roles, and perhaps some specific modules designed to create more of a community site.
My thoughts:
- Members can create accounts.
Absolutely.
- Each member gets a home page inside the community they can customize to a certain extent.
Definitely. You can even give users personal blogs.
- Members are able to dynamically create unlimited number of pages inside their homepage, these pages represent martial art techniques they invented which has text, pictures and possibly youTube videos.
You can do this with the CCK module, which is a big topic on its own. Check out http://drupal.org/project/cck.
You could possibly do this through the forums, or users could do this with their blogs. Probably there's even a better module out there for this. You can control what kind of media they can post as well. It's all going to take a bit of serious tweaking, but I think it's feasible.
- Members can assign categories for each page.
This is a little tougher. Since the mechanism to let users is to go through a forum or their blogs, assigning keywords isn't straightforward. It seems like http://drupal.org/project/nodewords might work.
- A central search engine for the site that can search by title, key word and/or category of all pages that were posted by all members of the community.
There is a simple search (you can see it on this site) that searches through all of that, but no advanced search. Potentially there's a module for that as well. It's worth digging around a bit at drupal.org.