One drupal site vs. separate pre-fabricated systems

As you may have seen on the old PBworks site I've been thinking about what infrastructure to use for the Ecological Data system and have generally converged on using Drupal - one of the major players in Content Management Systems and the system we use to run the other weecology sites. As mentioned in the email, I've been setting up this draft of the site for us to work on, but before we go any further I wanted to actually get feedback on whether this is best way to go. The alternative would be to use MediaWiki (the software that runs Wikipedia) for the wiki and a standard 'out of the box' forum system for the forums. A third option for the wiki would be to use something like PBworks or Confluence.

The advantage to this alternative setup is that these are highly targeted piece of software with a very specific job function. As such they will do it well and without a lot of work. Drupal on the other hand is completely generic. It can do almost anything, but it takes more work and may not be fully optimal for any given task (e.g., I think I've got at least half a dozen additional modules installed just to start implementing wiki style functionality).

Here is a (somewhat) short list of reasons that I put together on the old site for using Drupal:

  • Free
  • WYSIWYG editing
  • Fine-grained control of the things that users are allowed to do and see
  • Ability to dynamically generate lists of databases. So, as soon as a new database is added to the wiki it will be added to appropriate lists.
  • Ability to require particular fields and have those fields completed by drop down menus, radio buttons etc. This will prevent variability in things like using scientific versus common names, and help prevent users from forgetting to add key pieces of information (this is integrated into Drupal 7, but not in Drupal 6 which is what this site is currently running).
  • Taxonomy system to allow the inclusion and search of appropriate keywords
  • Allows for fully integrated site with Forum system and eventually Courses, and Software sections

To my mind the most important parts are the WYSIWYG editor and the ability to produce lists in a automatic fashion. As you'll see if you respond to this post, having a Word like editor bar with automated formatting is easy in Drupal. In MediaWiki you have to learn the special formatting codes and I'm worried that we'll lose a lot of folks. Anyway, the topic is open for debate!

Speaking as the least technological of the bunch, I think having a WYSIWGZ editor is going to be crucial. I've seen what happens when you have a bunch of people who are somewhat capable of word processing interfacing with html tags. It ain't pretty.  The GYSIWIG should help with some of those issues.