Re: Hey web guys - Anyone use Drupal?
I think wordpress right out of the box is going to be able to accomplish most of what you posted. I am not sure if there is a wiki plugin, but I would guess there is. I just need to search a little.
The Events section could be the blog, so it would be user contributed and commented. The Photo Gallery could be next gen gallery. Very simple to use and update.
OK I've started playing around with WP in a test installation. It does look pretty good.
I'm a little lost on the best way to structure the FAQ/Wiki/whatever in WP. I can't find a plugin that does anything like that but maybe I'm just not searching correctly. Then I started looking at building custom post types and custom taxonomy and filtering display based on that, but as best I can tell that gets into coding that's going to be fairly time consuming for me to figure out (which defeats the purpose of WP over Drupal), and probably be a bear to maintain through WP upgrades, which is something I really want to avoid.
I see what you mean about using regular posts for the event gallery, though ideally I'd like a way to show just one or the other. Should I create a post format for that, add custom fields and a custom view somehow, or...?
I installed NextGEN Gallery. It looks very cool! I haven't really had time to mess with it yet but I think it will definitely do the job. I didn't see anything about video.. Does it handle that, or do I need to use something else? I'd prefer to keep photos and videos in one place if possible. One thing that looks awesome about it is the ability to connect a gallery to a post. That will be great for event photos!
The front page could be done with a combination of the event blog and some static content to be able to post whatever you wanted. ie promote NSXPO. There are also plugins for sticky blogs so that could be valuable.
I think that would all work as well. Do you have a plugin you recommend for the sticky blog post function? The example of promoting NSXPO is perfect for what I'm after.
I don't know if you could integrate NSXprime user names with the wordpress backend, so most people would need to register on WP if they wanted to comment on blog posts etc. I would need to search and see if there is a plugin that can do that. Otherwise it could be done custom but pricey.
I found one plugin that claims to do it but it's pretty limited and it looked like a messy install.. and most critically the author just revived it after having abandoned it for a while. I can't really rely on something like that. Then I found some other stuff to basically push the vB user list into WP. But in thinking about it, I wonder if that is actually a useful goal. Maybe I should just direct discussion back to the forums somehow?
What is the best AdSense approach? I looked at a couple plugins but none of them seem very polished, and they also maddeningly don't seem to let you use the actual adsense code, you have to put in your publisher ID and select the ad types from a menu. Why can't I just paste my ad code in? I have the same frustration with the current AdSense setup on vB. I don't understand why they are written that way. Maybe I just picked bad plugins to test. Anyway, I assume I could also somehow manually paste AdSense code into text blocks in headers/footers/sidebars, but it'd be nice to be able to also put them into the articles without having to manually code or place each one since there are so many pages. Any suggestions?
Thanks for any further input from you or any of the other WP gurus! Sorry if any of my questions are dumb.. I really just started looking at it and I'm far from an expert at this kind of stuff to begin with.