is drupal good for the listed features

I am planning to build a portal with the following features. I was told that Drupal is a good choice. I wanted to know from experts here is that is the case.

Some content is public and some content is only for paid users.

Even for the public content, there should be a discussion forum but that can be accessed by public users only after free-registration.

Each week there will be a new poll. Last week's polling results should be displayed.

A nicely organized directory of companies in my city with brief info and a link should be displayed. I am looking for some manageability here as the list changes every once in a while.

I want contemporary look, RSS and all that modern features.

I want to provide blogs for selected users.

I want to maintain "Quizzes" section.

And lastly, I want to have a good search feature spanning the static content as well as the forums and user blogs.

I have the content ready, 1 PHP programmer and just one month time. I am even ready to buy a good product which is less expensive and does not have future vendor-lockin.

Thank you gurus.

 

Doable, easy. Drupal lets you set permissions for accessing content to roles, and the two default roles are anonymous user and authenticated user.

Doable, easy. Drupal has a built-in polling module.

Doable, anywhere from easy to difficult depending on the features you want. If you just want categories with different things listed in them, the add-on taxonomy_menu module coupled with the built-in taxonomies/categories makes it easy. You can use the CCK module to customize those listings.

Doable, easy. Drupal has a bunch of themes available for free, and automatically has RSS support.

Doable, I have no idea how easy. Drupal has a built-in blog module, but I have no idea how easy and configurable it is since I haven't used it. Drupal has a very blog-friendly interface, so I'd say "probably easy".

Doable, but it depends on the quiz. If you just want a web form that people fill in and post, it's no different than writing any HTML page.

Doable, easy. Just be sure to enable cron jobs so the site can re-index new content, otherwise your searches will not be indexed if you don't index them manually. I don't know about your ISP, but for mine it was two clicks to set up the cron job.

Well, depending on the amount of content and your or the programmer's skill with Drupal, it should take about two weeks to get everything you want done, and probably without touching a single line of PHP code. I can't imagine any product you can buy that will be able to do what you want easier and cheaper than Drupal.

For someone new to Drupal but otherwise web-savvy it will probably be closer to a month.

 

wonderful responses, thank you for sharing these with us

 

You may also want to consider Joomla, along with the 3rd party component Community Builder. Combined with some other free and commercial components you can do everything here. If you would like to see what I've done and what I've used, I'd be happy to share — just PM and I'll provide URL and a test account!

 

could you post the link so we can see the drupal setup once you are done?!? i use drupal as well and am curious to see what others are able to do with it. thanks

 

Extremly easy.. Just activate the module, setup a "bloggers" Security-access role and add your users..