Drupal has long been one of the most popular content management systems among webmasters.  However, with the growing popularity of membership websites, many people are wondering whether or not a Drupal membership website is the best choice.  This decision, for many people, will come down to how much work they want to do in order to set up and integrate the additional modules into their website.  While there is no “right” answer, by understanding what will need to be done in order to create a Drupal membership website, making this decision can be much easier.

Drupal historically has been considered to have a steeper learning curve than many other popular CMS options.  This makes integrating additional modules to create a membership website simpler for seasoned users than for newer Drupal webmasters.  In order to create a membership website, there are several common modules that will need to be installed.  These include: the Content Access module, CCK module, and a membership module.

Once you have Drupal installed, the first thing that will need to be done is to create a new “Role” for paying members.  Many people will name this role something like “Premium Member”, “Paid Member”, Bronze/Silver/Gold Member”, etc  Along with creating the name for the role, you must also create a new “Content Type” for the paying members.  This is where the CCK module comes into play.

Once the new Content Type has been created, you can use the Content Access module to rebuild/alter the node access permissions.  Once this has been taken care of, you must make sure that your new Content Type has been configured so that only Paying Members will have access to it.

Once all of this has been set up, it is now time to integrate the membership module of your choice.  In order to create a Drupal membership website for paying customers, there are several functions that a membership module must have.  The first is a way for members to register for your membership site.  During registration, this will include things like setting up a password, selecting a payment option, selecting a tier (if you are creating a tiered membership website), a way to connect to payment processor or payment gateway, as well as a way to set up trail memberships.  It is also important to make sure that you have the ability to utilize recurring billing, automatically renew subscriptions, and much more.  This may be taken care of with a single module or may require several modules, depending on which ones you choose.

As you can see, there are a variety of modules that will be necessary to create a Drupal membership website.  It is important to understand that you will need to know how to properly integrate all of these modules as well as manage them, whenever needed.  For some people, this will be, at most, a very minimal problem.  However, for others, this could be very frustrating, almost to the point of overwhelming.  Depending on how familiar you are with Drupal, it may be a great choice for a membership website.  Deciding whether or not a Drupal membership website is the “best” choice is entirely up to you.

What is Joomla?

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

What are some real world examples of what Joomla! can do?

Joomla is used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example:

* Corporate Web sites or portals
* Corporate intranets and extranets
* Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
* E-commerce and online reservations
* Government applications
* Small business Web sites
* Non-profit and organizational Web sites
* Community-based portals
* School and church Web sites
* Personal or family homepages

Who uses Joomla?

Here are just a few examples of Web sites that use Joomla:

* MTV Networks Quizilla (Social networking) – http://www.quizilla.com
* IHOP (Restaurant chain) – http://www.ihop.com
* Harvard University (Educational) – http://gsas.harvard.edu
* Citibank (Financial institution intranet) – Not publicly accessible
* The Green Maven (Eco-resources) – http://www.greenmaven.com
* Outdoor Photographer (Magazine) – http://www.outdoorphotographer.com
* PlayShakespeare.com (Cultural) – http://www.playshakespeare.com
* Senso Interiors (Furniture design) – http://www.sensointeriors.co.za

Joomla Demo: http://demo.joomla.org/

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

• Electronic commerce
• Blogs
• Collaborative authoring environments
• Forums
• Peer-to-peer networking
• Newsletters
• Podcasting
• Picture galleries
• File uploads and downloads

and much more.

Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL (“GNU General Public License”) and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. If you like what Drupal promises for you, please work with us to expand and refine Drupal to suit your specific needs.

Demo: http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/details.php?scriptid=191
Themes: http://drupal.org/project/Themes
Modules: http://drupal.org/project/Modules

Price: Free- Open Source
Installation: You need to install yourself.
Trial Version: free
Support: Forums
Required Software: PHP, mysql
Description:With many modules (extra add on features), such as blogs, voting, and reviews, Drupal is a very good basic CMS system.

Beginners with some PHP knowledge can install, but for customization, I recommend it for intermediate and advanced users.

Drupal Web Site Examples;

Drupal Admin Panel:

WordPress is a blog publishing application and content management system. It was first released in May 2003 by its co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as the successor to b2/cafelog. It is powered by PHP and a SQL data backend. As of September 2009, WordPress is used by 62.8 million websites in the US and 202 million websites worldwide.

Features:

WordPress has a templating system, which includes widgets that can be rearranged without editing PHP or HTML code, as well as themes that can be installed and switched between. The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced customizations. WordPress also features integrated link management; a search engine-friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; multiple author capability; and support for tagging of posts and articles. Automatic filters that provide for proper formatting and styling of text in articles (for example, converting regular quotes to smart quotes) are also included. WordPress also supports the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites that have themselves linked to a post or article. Finally, WordPress has a rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install.

Multi-Blogging:

WordPress supports one weblog per installation, although multiple concurrent copies may be run from different directories if configured to use separate database tables.

WordPress Multi-User (WordPress MU, or just WPMU) is a fork of WordPress created to allow simultaneous blogs to exist within one installation. WordPress MU makes it possible for anyone with a website to host their own blogging community, control, and moderate all the blogs from a single dashboard. WordPress MU adds eight new data tables for each blog.

Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress MU would be merged with WordPress as part of a future release.[24]

Lyceum is another enterprise-edition of WordPress. Unlike WordPress MU, Lyceum stores all of its information in a set number of database tables. Notable communities that use Lyceum are TeachFor.Us[25] (Teach For America teachers’ blogs), BodyBlogs and the Hopkins Blogs.

In 2008 Andy Peatling joined Automattic to continue his work on BuddyPress – a plug-in extension of WPMU that is adding missing community features to WordPress.

“Add New Post” page of the WordPress administration interface. Version 2.8