harrison wrote:
Why not just migrate the site to the latest version of Xoops? That way you should be able to retain the look and content of the existing site better than trying to migrate the whole site is a completely new CMS model.
Good question, but two reasons.
1) Xoops is now about 20 revisions above the version we use now. There is no upgrade path for software this old. Toss in that you're not just talking about Xoops but individual modules (such as newbb) which aren't supported any longer, and it's almost impossible.
2) Xoops went CSS / XHTML several years ago. This is why we stopped upgrading. Their decision to "live in the present" (to be compatible with all the current standards), makes it pretty much incompatible with Classic Amigas unless I want to spend 2 months ripping code out of it -- which means we'd be stuck with no upgrade path again
Drupal is a very nice CMS. It is one of the most versatile, but also one of the hardest to get to grips
with.
I understand the learning curve issues, but as a web dev, challenges might be fun for a change, and just what this site needs to become interesting again (from a dev standpoint). I'm already working to learn it now on another site or two.
An alternative if you don't want to stick with Xoops is Joomla. I've been using it since the Mambo days and it is my preferred CMS over all others. And with Joomla 1.5 the CMS's core code is better than ever, more streamlined and easier to work with. And the mod community for Joomla is bigger than any other CMS on the market, commercial or open source.
Joomla is my second choice, but I've only got experience with 1.0x, which wasn't usable for a site like Amiga.org is.
My loathing of the work involved in getting 1.0x to do anything at all makes it very difficult for me to embrace the 1.5 direction.
One question that springs to mind. What are you going to do regarding forum software? Have you looked into how Drupal bridges the membership accounts with the forum software you are thinking of using? And also if the existing members accounts can be ported?
I could either use Drupal's built in forums (which -- humorously -- are so basic that they'd be Amiga compatible out of the box) or I could hitch into something like VBulletin, which still has an upgrade path for our Xoops.
Matter of fact, last case scenario -- and it's a thought -- I could just scrap the world as we know it, put up VBulletin (importing users/forums/posts) and forego the news, images, and other stuff until I could write custom pages for those sections.
Wayne