Nick, hi.
Firstly, Im also biased as I work directly with an agency who employ the use of Drupal and Umbraco cms'.
I would say to a verying degree that both could probably meet your needs. Each will have out of the box functionality that would differ from one to another and given the undoubted complexity of your requirements and integration with other technologies each would need bespoke development to some degree.
The level of development will depend on the level of functionality you require. Open source will future proof you against either being tied to an agency or planning to bring dev inhouse. The key thing is selecting a very good agency partner.
Builders all use the same materials but you've no doubt seen beautiful, stable and safe solid buildings and then you've also probably seen the ones on programmes like 'Cowboy Builders'; crumbling and built with no regard for best practise or the people that own them. Excellent Project Management is also key here, as someone already suggested. Recently we've been picking up projects with big name clients who've had Drupal implementations but bad experiences with their dev agency. We audit code, get a clear picture of what's going on, scope, fix, implement properly, they're happy again.
Addressing a couple of mentions around Drupal; It's perfect for large complex organisations and requirements. We almost exclusively design and build for charities/nfps/membership bodies, large numbers of which have ticketing/ecommerce/membership components. We chose to specialise in Drupal precisely because of this.
With Drupal 7 having been around for sometime now and hugely stable/proven and Drupal 8 release just around the corner, relating to Drupal 5...Well, it bears no comparison. The whole nature of opensource means the longer its established the better it gets, with a global network of developers continually improving it.
Back to selecting a tech platform, yes, you need a fully scoped list of functional requirements before you can assess which may be the best out of the box and then how much bespoke dev you might need following. Bespoke dev/systems integration/content migration are usually the budget eaters.
Sent from my Xperia™ tablet
J DAVIS <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Re Sarah Saunders' comments:
Of course the off-the-shelf open source web CMSs are not designed to be image collection management systems as well so do not have the structure required for adequate description and creation metadata (and therefore retrieval) of images.
I think that the image collection management system needs to remain separate (currently) but would like to see the automatic importing of at least the essential picture metadata being possible in a web CMS. Perhaps someone has already build a WordPress media library plugin that would enable the categorisation of images, some more structured metadata (maybe imported?)?
I do get very irritated still that web CMSs automatically strip out my carefully crafted descriptions and other metadata from images, and would be delighted if improved media library capability could be incorporated sometime in the future.
Janet
Janet E Davis
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