CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

CiviCRM noob here. I am about to begin development of a CiviCRM site for a non-profit agency. I have created several WordPress sites, but am new to Drupal. I took a basic class on Drupal and feel comfortable learning to use it. I just don't want to go down a new path if it's really not necessary. Is there compelling reasons for me to choose Drupal? I've heard that it can be more daunting for the developer, but my aim is to give my client the best site possible, so functionality and ease of use for them is what I'm want.

That makes sense. Perhaps if I outline their needs a bit you might tell me if WP isn't enough. I do appreciate the help.

They are a non-profit that wants people to have membership profiles that they can log into and adjust settings in relationship to newsletter opt in/out, recurring donations (credit card, address, all that), event registration, notification, reminders and rsvp, as well as unsubscribe entirely. They are hoping all this can happen automatically, without administration.

The client would like a WYSIWYG template for the newsletter, the ability to personalize emails based on roles or other criteria, and statistics for activity. They want to be able to post events and news, or edit page content themselves, without too much trouble.

Site speed, future development, expandability are always issues. WordPress being built more as a blogging system than CMS, is it trying to accomplish something that Drupal does more natively?

I suppose it's all pretty basic. But since I'm new to CiviCRM I'm trying not to get too far ahead in the development process only to find out that I've chosen the wrong CMS. It seems like CiviCRM has a solid base in Drupal and only a recent foray into WP, so I worry that the documentation might be less developed there.

I have installed 4.3.alpha1 for WordPress and look forward to contributing.

I did notice that the menu link for help > documentation goes to http://documentation.civicrm.org/ which returns a 404 error. Is that something I would report as an issue or is that too trivial? Being new to all this I don't want to come across as ridiculous.