What framework or cms to use for this? Drupal/Codeigniter?

Question

I'm going to start very wide and multi-featured project with 4 major sections at the front-end and multiple roles and permission at the back-end. The site will be consisting of enormous amount of data and almost all data are search oriented. It's a kind of directory website. Being a directory website the older data won’t be archived and will be equally important as the newly added ones.

The section at front-end are:

1. Business Listings
2. Service Listings
3. Classifieds
4. News

The site basically consists of 4 user types, of which two of them consist of 2 sub-types.

The structure will be some what like this:

There will also be sms integration. The main thing in this website is that it will be accessed from multiple domain. That is, if ppl come from by the url www.a2zusa.com, they will get business listings for whole of U.S.A. If they come from www.a2znewyork.com they will get listings for newyork city.

The choice i have is codeigniter and drupal. Am not that good in Drupal and will have to learn on the way. What would you suggest for a project like this?

Project structure"

Answer 1

One is a framework, one is a CMS. They both solve quite different problems, although you could probably do anything with either if you really, really wanted to.

If you want to write an entire application and don't need to use all of the stuff that Drupal already provides, then I would suggest going with CodeIgniter (or whatever other framework tickles your fancy).

If you want to do something that fits in reasonably well with what Drupal and its million and one plugins do, and your own additions are reasonably straightforward, then write a drupal plugin to handle your stuff and use Drupal (or whatever other CMS tickles your fancy).

From your description, I think that most of what you're talking about could probably be done with minimal work in Drupal, but the devil is in the details, so I couldn't say for sure.

Answer 2

You should choose CodeIgniter. Not that I am a codeigniter user but it's what framework you are used to working with.

There could be a lot of options out there but the benefit would be that you already know the ins and outs of the framework and studying content management framework would delay you.

If you want to learn Drupal, then go ahead. It could be a nice learning experience.