[support] Dupal vs DotNetNuke

[Fred Jones]

> I have a big project for a customer here in China and after studying its
> requirements and the different technologies available out there, I am left
> with two choices: Drupal and DotNetNuke.
> This project indeed involve a very detailed list of user groups and
> permissions for its different features and these two Open-Source CMS seem to
> be the ones that provide the best ACL.
> I am personally more experienced with DotNetNuke and I'm confident that I
> could find all the DNN modules that I need for this project, but my team has
> mostly been working with Joomla! so if I can find all these modules for
> Drupal, that would probably be best.

I don't see why experience with Joomla will help with Drupal. I know
Drupal but when I occasionally look at a Joomla admin interface, I am
fairly lost.

> 1 - User Registration
> The main reason for choosing Drupal for this website is that it offers a
> powerful ACL. After registering to the website, users will be put in the
> Members group, but they should also have the ability to submit further
> documents and details to become a Verified Members. So it would be great to
> find an existing module that can handle two-steps registrations.

I am not aware of such, but this would be a trivial module to create.
It's not a new registration, it's just adding another role to the
existing user.

> 2 - User Profile
> Registered users will be given the ability to manage their own user profile.
> Like most websites of this kind, users will be able to keep some of these
> details private.
> However, even though the email address might not be displayed, users should
> be able to email the users they visit the user profile. This is similar to
> sending a message to the user except that the message is send by email. No
> need for an internal inbox for each user.

This exists in core Drupal as "user contact form."

> 3 - User Directory
> The purpose of this module is to provide the ability to access the profiles
> of the users in a specific group (i.e. the list of Verified Members).
> Details of the different users will be displayed according to a set of
> internal rules (i.e. do not show the email address) and according to each
> user preferences (i.e. user can choose to show his address or not).
> To browse this directory, visitors will be able to use an advanced search
> interface (i.e. search by name, city, region, country...) or by clicking on
> a simple map with predefined regions.

The Organic Groups module has the first part of your requirement. As
far as searching, I am not sure if this exists or not, but this would
be fairly easy to code.

> 4 - Marketing Tools
> The purpose of this module is to take advantage of the list of users to send
> them newsletters and invitations according to different criteria (i.e.
> group, region, date of birth...).

I am not sure about this--I haven't dealt with this type of
functionality so I don't know.

> 5 - Calendar of Events
> A standard calendar module that can be configured to display role based
> events.

Events module and submodules.

> 6 - Forums
> A standard forum module that can be configured to display role based
> threads.

Forum module is a core Drupal module. Setting up permissions to forums
based on roles is doable--may require one of the advanced permissions
modules.

> 7 - Online Discussion
> The purpose of this module is to setup an online discussion on a specific
> topic between an expert and the different users of the website. Questions
> will be posted by the users for the expert to answer. Moderators will need
> to review the questions before they are sent to the expert.

This can be handled by a combination of various modules--there are
different options how to implement this.

> 8 - RSS Feeds
> A standard RSS reader module that can be configured to display role based
> feeds.

RSS is core Drupal functionality. To permission them by role may
require one of the advanced permissions modules.

> 9 - News Feeds
> A standard news module that can be configured to display role based news.
> Ideally the administrator of the website should be able to publish news in
> different categories and each category will be displayed in a different
> page, but if that's not possible, administrating several instance of the
> module should be fine.
> Control over the number of news per page and over the layout of the
> different pages should be easy to setup or hack.

Views module and submodules.

The main advantage of Drupal IMO is that it is easily extensible. If a
feature doesn't exist, it's not difficult to add it.

HTH,
Fred