Handling complex data collection with a CMS

Question

I do web work for a group at the university I attend. We’re having a design company redo our site and will be coding the site ourselves. We’d like to build the new site on top of a CMS so that people can easily add content. So far I’ve been looking into using Drupal. The problem I’m running into while thinking through how well Drupal will work for us is in regards to data collection. We’re overhauling our database to keep data centralized. For example, rather than create a table for every form with fields for First Name and Last Name (common fields for a lot of the forms we do) and all other fields, we’re pulling the common fields out to tables like a user table. This will help us track people’s involvement with our group much better and make our data far more useful. Is there any easy way to do this with Drupal modules? I’ve looked into CCK a bit but it doesn’t look like it’s useful for more than simple data that doesn’t have “complex” relationships between tables.

What are your recommendations? Are there some good modules I could use; do you recommend a different CMS (NOTE: needs to be php) that would better suite my needs?

Answer 1

I have the same exact question as you -- so far the best CMS I've come across for data collection from forms is Concrete5 (http://concrete5.org). Any time you use their "form" block, the submissions are sent to the "Reports" section on the back end of the dashboard. I don't love their organization method, but it's the best I've seen so far, and it also lets you dump to a file.

Answer 2

I think you want Drupal with Views and Organic Groups.

What kind of forms do you have?

Answer 3

You shouldn't use Drupal if you care about database structure. CCK is the method of defining content types, used on 60% of all Drupal sites and the basis of fields in Drupal 7 core.

That said, you may want to question a few of your assumptions. First, there are a lot of modules that add new field types to CCK, e.g. FileField, so it may not be as simple as you think. Second, do you really need to worry about how the database is organized, or is that just a means to some other end, e.g. reporting. If it's reporting you're after, you can generally handle that with Views, the only module used more than CCK.

If you really do need to worry about the database structure and really do need more complex relations than CCK can handle, I'd suggest you're not looking for a CMS so much as a framework. Those kinds of details are generally handled automatically in a CMS.