The new DarkLight Nocturnal Entertainment on Drupal

Hello everyone,

DarkLight is roughly a decade old, and mostly a Dark-Alternative online community site in South Africa. For a very long time it was phpBB (forums) based and later added the excellent CH mod by Ptirhiik for Modified Preordered Tree Traversed hierarchical forums so that we could diversify the forums a little. Some additional mods by me included the country flags mod that I later tied in to a more locationally aware system for events listings in members' areas of residence, the gallery system that was very specific in it's requirements to DarkLight and the MusicBase feeding of Audioscrobbler, MusicBrainz and Amazon and integrated with the forums system right through to profiles and posts with various music charts.

phpBB became a little stifling in the end and I really needed a CMS for the site. I considered what I think must have been all of them. Installed at home and tested a little then discarded for one reason or another. I just couldn't find something suitable and extendable enough. This kept going for nearly a year. What I can say is that I ended up keeping an eye on various options holding out hopes that they will mature well:

Joomla was a near hit - but after getting to know it a little it seemed to aim overwhelmingly at ease of use without good back-end and well thought through implementation. I'd have had to rewrite nearly every single module.

XOOPS seemed fine too - but the main site going off and on and it seemingly being dependent on the whims and availability of few or one core developer scared me. It also just turned v.1. when I was there last.

XARAYA was the closest I got to switching sites. I had a whole site ready to go, it seems quite powerful, but I like having the developer resources available to me such as in the Drupal handbooks. XARAYA seemed to me developed in some off 'Web fashion and navigating their site is just painful! The developers also appear to be less English speaking.

Drupal was the sure hit, the one CMS that I was holding out for secretly hoping that it existed. It is so damned perfect in it's planning and approach! To then discover a South African being one of the core developers and a new South African Drupal group was amazing. The documentation is great! I first tried it out last week with a quick-launch of the domiNation.co.za site, a very quiet site. From that, I learned a little more. Then, this weekend, I moved DarkLight over to it's new Drupal version.

DarkLight, now on Drupal (still very new).

Now, DarkLight is a labour of love, so I have to fit it in between work and I wish my work involved programming, but it doesn't. That speaks volumes about the ease with which a Drupal site can be set up in one weekend. Granted, it still needs a lot of work, but it is up and running and people are loving it. We have most of our active users over on the new site now and things are going very well.

I have one hell of a to do list for the news site. The CSS is not working all that well with IE, but doesn't break the site completely, so I'll leave that as a though the week some time priority item ;-)

Much of what we need can already be done by existing modules for Drupal. Though very new to Drupal, I believe the taxonomy_access.module will take care of our forums permissions.

The Flaforum is already active and it's easy to make new profile fields and then have them appear next to users' posts. I'll likely use this for avatars too. I'm guessing adding a filer module will see smilies come back to the forums; I'm not too fond of them myself, but users love 'em. It may also be something that should rather be added through TinyMCE integration which is one of the prioritised to do items to install. Then I have to track down the quote module and see if there's a method to attach files to comment, not just new thread posts (nodes). also left to find would be a spell checker if one exists and wait for the onine.module to reach 4.7 compatibility.

Forums aside, I'm a little worried about spam bots, so need to add the capcha.module some time. users still use the old site's Private Massaging system. Stats on the old site shows more content in the PM system than on the site itself. It makes for a one-stop site for a community.

Drupal still needs a lot of stuff but the stuff Drupal needs didn't even feature on the lists of requirements for other CMSs that I considered... one thing would be the dependency system I heard talk of somewhere and it especially needs to be versioning aware though I suspect the new form system (which could do with some more, yes, even more modularity) is a temporary cause right now for many modules not being compatible. After all, the new 4.7 was just released now. The forums also need a lot of work. Between issues that I can fix with time through just installing and setting up existing modules correctly and issues that have to do with forums functionality there's nothing really that the users are complaining about.

The two biggest contributors to the success of the new site was the communities of Drupal developer and DarkLight users. Drupal seem to be very community developer involved. I cannot believe the amazing system that was built here! DarkLight's Editors (the term we chose to call the group of users formerly known and moderators on the forums based site) worked through the night last night to bring loads of content online for the new site and are still working on it as we speak. I popped in to the site at 3 a.m. last night while unblinkering an eye with my cell phone to find them still online working away!

Thanks to the Drupal community and thanks to the DarkLight community!

I'll comment on this post every now and again to report how the new additions are going. I'll have to write modules fo the gallery, the musicbase, location awareness and events some time.

PS: This is my first post like this on Drupal, hope it conforms to content guidelines and that I didn't offend anyone.