Drupal - php-based CMS

Forgive me if this is a blatantly stupid comment, but perhaps drupal would be of interest? I've heard very good things, but I've never used it personally.

Quote
http://drupal.org/about

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including

* Community web portals
* Discussion sites
* Corporate web sites
* Intranet applications
* Personal web sites or blogs
* Aficionado sites
* E-commerce applications
* Resource directories
* Social Networking sites

The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

* Electronic commerce
* Blogs
* Collaborative authoring environments
* Forums
* Peer-to-peer networking
* Newsletters
* Podcasting
* Picture galleries
* File uploads and downloads

and much more.

Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL ("GNU General Public License") and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. If you like what Drupal promises for you, please work with us to expand and refine Drupal to suit your specific needs.

[Edit - good idea, if icky-php-but-mature-CMS - I'm splitting this thread off - Sebastien Bailard]

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/20/2010 08:33PM by SebastienBailard.

Hypoon, it's not a stupid comment. It's a bit naive, but I'm naive as well.

From my reading of such things like:
[en.wikipedia.org]

drupal would probably work, although the way that everything is a "node"
[drupal.org]
is frustrating to me, as I've fallen in love with the wiki
[[StepperMotor]] interface.

(The [[]] stuff is Mediawiki markup code. Utterly lovely.)

You can do a wiki in drupal, or in most of the CMS's on this long list (ignore):
[www.cmsmatrix.org]

Example wiki on django here:
[news.e-scribe.com]

---

Basically, any of the big names up on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application_frameworks should work. But we'll go with what a systems architect decides. If a guru parachutes in and says "my favorite system is x", we'll probably go with x.

If we get two gurus, we'll let them fight it out, and go with what the louder one likes.

If we don't get a guru, we'll muddle it out in someone's favorite progamming language. We'll probably end up with something coded in zsh, and end up using nethack-gtk as a administrator user interface. (My favorite text editor.)

Or maybe something nicely scalable and clean and extensible in one of the big name web application frameworks, if we proceed thoughtfully.

---

The only reason I suggested django is because python seems a bit more readable than php. I don't really know either, I just have very strong opinions about how the website needs to work, based on repeated observations on how mediawiki has failed us, and from eyeballing sites that do social networking well.

Something like thingiverse would work well, maybe, with a bit of wiki 'bolted on'. But the RepRap developer who coded that is currently busy with other stuff, so we probably need to roll our own.

So at least I was somewhere in the right ballpark there with Drupal. I now understand better what you're trying to do, and what you're looking for. I'm going to play around with Drupal a bit and see what it's capable of, since I remember hearing good things. I'm pretty sure that MediaWiki can be integrated with Drupal, and I know that Phorum can. I'll look into just how difficult these integrations are.

I'll look into just how difficult these integrations are.

I suspect it has lots of hidden traps for the unwary, and that learning-while-doing while at the same time expecting to transitioning or integrating mediawiki with something complicated becomes a maintenance mess.

I'd appreciate hearing the views of folk who have thought about these matters more deeply.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2010 03:29AM by SebastienBailard.