I'm entertaining the idea of redesigning http://www.darktronica.com so that it's running through Drupal, Joomla or something similar but could use some advice about how feasible it would be, given the custom functionality I have coded into the back end.

Right now, the News section is WordPress, but everything else is run on a custom-coded CMS that I wrote myself. It's all PHP interfacing with a MySQL database, but the admin section that I use to update information about bands has a lot of stuff that I imagine would be difficult to integrate with any of the professional CMS's out there. For instance, to keep up with new album releases, I have a page that queries the database on http://discogs.com, parses the returned XML document for new releases, and then displays a form that lets me pick and choose which releases to automatically add to my own database.

It's been a while since I've looked in-depth at packages like Drupal to see what they can do, but would it be possible to have a page for each band that would have the normal band info and writeup like usual and then query the database for all of the discography and display it accordingly? More importantly, would maintenance and updating bands be as easy for me as it is now--taking advantage of Discogs.com's API--or would I have to go back to manually entering data for each album myself?


Right now, what I have works just fine for me, but I'm considering the redesign for the following reasons. Comments on alternatives for these would be welcome too. Maybe I'm flat-out wrong on some of these, since I don't do programming or design as a job and don't keep up with the latest.

1) Would make it easier for each band's page to also have an integrated wiki-style section or to allow user comments/reviews
2) Current design still has a few minor quirks re: cross-browser compatibility
3) Current back end area doesn't have a great text editor for the band writeups or an easy way to automatically cross-link other pages on the site, so band updates can still be a bit time-consuming
4) Professional CMS's do a better job with basic SEO stuff than what I currently have
5) Would be easier to integrate silly shit I probably don't need but could implement in the future, like a Twitter feed for the site or other third-party widgets
6) All in all, there are enough minor changes I'd like to make to the site that it would merit a redesign, so I might as well do it right with a better package if I can


Thoughts?

7/22/2009 11:41:45 PM

what do you consider oomph!? i really like them, but when i was in germany staying with a friend, he laughed at me

7/23/2009 7:47:23 AM

If it's all PHP I don't see why you'd have any issues moving it to a new CMS.




for example, I use Wordpress as a CMS for client sites all the time, and all of my sites invariably end up with some extremely custom PHP functionality. Generally these PHP bits are thrown into a custom page template. Joomla and Drupal seem to follow that same basic structure - anything that you write yourself goes in custom page template, and you apply that template to whatever end result page you want.

7/23/2009 10:42:12 AM

^ So I can see building custom page templates for the band pages and that not being too bad, but would I be able to keep the same database I have now and have a CMS interface with it on the backend when doing updates? I don't want to lose the ability to query discogs.com for new albums, because that saves me a ton of time and effort. I guess I'm just not clear on how much the CMS options out there use their own database to store everything, and how easy it would be to pull information from my current database and take advantage of its own structure.



^^ OOMPH! is basically the band that originally inspired groups like Rammstein to mix hard metal guitar with dance beats and electronics. In Germany, that kind of sound is called the New German Hard movement and is a mix of heavy metal and industrial. The reason your friend laughed at you is because that scene is really prevalent and almost verges on pop music over there; they regard industrial metal and hard German techno like we regarded the pop punk movement here a few years ago and the "scene kids" stuff here now. OOMPH! is still popular but it's not cool to admit it.

7/23/2009 1:09:04 PM

oh

7/23/2009 1:14:22 PM

If i'm not mistake, your PHP should still query the same tables in your DB, regardless of what CMS template it is in.




That is, unless I'm misunderstanding what you're asking.

7/23/2009 11:06:38 PM