Anyone using Drupal

Thought I would drop the question as to how many of you are using Drupal these days ... www.drupal.org

I went towards Drupal after the vBulletin integration as I am a big fan of the vB forum software and when www.vbdrupal.org came about I looked at Drupal in a different light and decided to go through with the whole learning experience

Almost there, on the configuring and customizing of themes currently

Any users out there?

 

I love it. It has an initial learning curve, but once you get up the curve it's not so bad. The leaders of the project have also worked to make it a bit easier to start using by demystifying some of the taxonomy issues.

The code is tighter and the programming standards higher than for other open source CMS programs, I think (I'm not a programmer, so I could be wrong, but that is the definite impression I get from talking to a lot of people). The core is also pretty small, so if you don't load it up with a lot of contributed modules it's a very tight little program. On the other hand, pretty much any functionality you need is available in a contrib module, and implementing them is generally as easy as FTPing the module to the module directory on your site, and then following the set up menus.

If you get to heavy loads, it takes some tweaking, but it does run some pretty high traffic sites, such as The Onion and MTV.uk.

The community is also pretty friendly. I went to the Drupalcon in Brussels last fall, and the people were great.

 

Thanks Ray

nice feedback .. what swung me was the vBdrupal integration with vB ..

I would be interested to know as to how it knocks server resources (??)

I am hoping to put all the projects onto drupal and was wondering what the impact would be on the servers

Cheers

 

I run some VERY large drupal sites so can help on this, what type of traffic are you looking at and what modules are you thinking of using?

 

Hi there

one portal has 100 000 visitors a month and almost all the drupals will be integrated with vBulletin in the form of www.vbdrupal.org

bit silly of me to start asking now only

I am trying to get towards the www.lime.com layoout (which uses drupal actually)

thanks for your time

 

That should be fine especially with vbulletin, lime does not look like they are using any of the hairy / dodgy modules. I would strongly suggest for scalablity that you use a caching solution, probably start with block caching and stick in http://drupal.org/project/boost if you have a lot of static content.

If you are technical there are some core patch's to split the caching table as well that are quite good but if you are good enough to patch core, skip all that and just stick in memcache and eaccelarator. These make a huge difference, also might (be careful) want to switch some tables to innodb.

Overall doubt it will be an issue but drop me a pm if you have problems

 

huh I am playing with drupal now for last two days. This one is very good cms. Wish I tried it earlier hehe. I see couple of you guys are quite experienced .... now if anyone can help me understand all that categories thing.

I want to make categories which all have menu links and when you click on the category in the menu it takes you to the page with articles which all have 200 character teasers .... I know it can be done just with pages ( static content ) but would really want to be able just to assign article ( page ) to category ....

Anyone ?

 

Thanks Skellig

will drop you a PM sometime ... unfortunately I am not so technically minded but have set it as one of my tasks this year to become more involved with the technical side of things.

thanks

 

Personally I would use CCK and views for doing this, believe me the earlier you get familiar with these two modules the better, they will save you so much time and frustration.

Other very good module options are Category and http://drupal.org/project/publishing (merlinofchaos is excellent)

If you want a quick fix then you can use the teaser and taxonomy fuctions but I would tend to spend the time getting cck and views working as you will never regret this (cck is moving into core). You can still integrate the taxonomy stuff in cck.

 

Hi Skellig

have you any experience with the PANELS module .. as this seems quite nifty ..

I want to set a fixed width in the same manner as the LIME website ... not sure whether to edit the bluemarine theme to achieve this or not

what are your thoughts on this, please?

 

Panels are very good if you are not familiar with the drupal themes then I would try and do as much as possible with panels before messing with the themes as it can be very fiddly to get the cross browswer stuff working if you mess about a lot with the theme (but no worse than any other cms theme).

Basic recommendations on modules required for any drupal install would go as follows.

Must have modules:

• CCK + all cck adins (saves messing creating you own)
• Views
• Title
• Nodewords
• Front page
• Panel
• Path
• Path Auto (be careful with this is you have more than 50,000 nodes)
• RobotsTxt
• taxonomy breadcrumb
• Views + Views BonusPack

There are countless others but all tend to be application specific, however I would rarely build a site without the above.

V5 of drupal will be out very soon and this will change the playing field (for the better, but it will take a couple of weeks for the modules to catch up.

 

thanks Skellig for recommendations...will look at cck but I find it a little confusing .... guess time is needed ....

 

think of CCK and views in the way you would think of an access database.

CCK allows you to create fields in a table (node) and views allows you to create reports on that data.

 

nice input Skellig

will look more at the CCK and views

you don't mention the FCKeditor

This cross browser compatibility is the major pain in the behind

 

Yeah FCKeditor or Tinymce or Xinha are all handy to have however watch for them breaking the theme on small forms / content areas. I have switched to Tinymce from Xinha but to tell the truth I dont see much of a difference.

 

Remember that to work swiftly drupal should have at least 12mb limit to run php scrpits.

 

Drupal is a great cms ( and i tested a few ). It has a slow learning curve but after you start to understand how is made and how simple is it you will be in love
PHPTemplate is great, you can adapt a html template for drupal using those neat snipets in a few hours.
And on the performance part.. this is really great.
Before trying drupal i was making some tests with Joomla but browsing their forum on performance issues part i get over some horror stories about websites killing a server at only 2k or so visitors/day.
The website in my signature is drupal based (not to many modules installed thou and missing a nice theme - working on redesign right now ) and it handled up to 35k uniques and 45k pageviews in one day without any issue. And it's hosted on a shared account.

Anyway.. use drupal. A few modules that i found to be necessary to any project are:
- views
- article
- tinymce combined with img_assist for image upload and control
- pathauto for clean url's
- taxonomy_breadcrumb

 

I used Drupal for my site: designphase.net

 

the learning curve is definitely tough (if you want to make more out of the platform)

I am trying to get the themes right, there is a lot of info on the main website but going through everything can be painstakingly slow and if you have cross browser problems it can killing

makes you really dislike IE even more



ps.. i truly believe it will be the best thing since sliced bread once i get to grips with it

 

interesting dylan, did you create your own theme or modify one?