http://leftfield.inf.ed.ac.uk/drupal-6.16/

http://bjorling.inf.ed.ac.uk/

We are currently experimenting with them, so they are not an example of a final site.

Remember we have a Plone DICE site at: http://wcms.inf.ed.ac.uk/dice

Pros and Cons list

First off the general pros and cons of switching:

Sticking with Plone - Pros:

• Less immediate work
• Already does a lot of what we want out of the box
• Sites already using it
• Site creation reasonably intuitive

Sticking with Plone - Cons:

• Becoming less popular within the University
• Little local community support

Switching to Drupal - Pros:

• Growing support within the Uni - IS, Physics
• Uses better understood technology - PHP MySQL/Postgres
• Local users are requesting it.
• Already in use by inviduals/groups within Informatics - openvce.net

Switching to Drupal - Cons:

• Initial learning curve - though doesn't seem as bad as Plone
• Possibility of porting existing Plone sites.
• Would now be supporting 2 WCMSes
• Publishers already know Plone. Some concepts/terminology in Drupal are different.
• Some modules require a newer PHP than 5.1 (SL5), Drupal 7 requires MySQL 5.0.15 or PostgreSQL 8.3 (for database) and PHP Version 5.2 or higher.

Technical Pros and Cons:

Plone Pros -

• Revision control
• Staging edits/workflow
• flexible, configurable
• robust page linkage functionality
• easy to use (in the simple cases)

Plone Cons -

• Monolithic and opaque data store - data.fs
• Complicated
• Upgrades time-consuming
• Possibly HTTPS caching problems (possibly fixed)

Drupal Pros -

• Lots of additional modules
• Does seem straightforward to modify templates/themes.
• flexible, configurable

Drupal Cons -

• Requires extra packages to provide equivalent Plone functionality (Drupal 7 may improve things)
• Comprehensive investigation of functionality requires more time - eg Cosign auth not tested
• image handling doesn't seem as good as Plone's, perhaps extra modules will help.
• only simple permissions/delegation mechanisms
• upgrades not straightforward, all contributed Third Party modules need to support new version before core is upgraded
• major releases only "when ready", no scheduled timetable.

Additional Drupal Considerations

Workflow - default functionality is minimal - need to look at something better

Authorisation - Can we have the ITO manage /teaching and sysman /systems for example? ("better support for multi-site installations" in Drupal 7)

WYSIWIG editor - tinymce installed - needs further investigation withrespect to images/linking

News items and display - basics can be made to work, need to look for better news content type (or create own with CCK)

Friendly URLs/structure.

images - location, uploading and linking to (although there is "improved image handling, including better support for add-on image libraries" in Drupal 7)

event - calendar - implementable, but could be better, Events module only "dev" for Drupal 6 (CCK may help here?)

migrating existing content into either

Requirements

-- NeilBrown - 07 Sep 2010