Drupal does not have the functionality we need, we'd need custom development either way. SoFurry is not based on Drupal, and with good reason. None of those chat modules have the required featureset, compatibility with our distributed setup and/or the needed performance either.
Plus our chat is tied in with our group system, any user can form a community group and create their own private/public chat rooms and forums... coding integration for such things, and the subsequent maintenance, is a nightmare. I know, we did exactly that for many years: We used phpbb and SMF as forums, and VOC and phpchat as chat software.
I'm not saying that rolling your own is always the better thing to do, but for us it definitely was worth it.
For 2.0 we're using the Yii Framework because we want to focus on the actual application, not the internal plumbing. Yii gives us a flexibility that Drupal doesn't have, for Drupal is a CMS and Yii is truly just an application framework that gives you many common things for free while encouraging the creation of clean and maintainable code.
Drupal does not have the functionality we need, we'd need custom development either way. SoFurry is not based on Drupal, and with good reason. None of those chat modules have the required featureset, compatibility with our distributed setup and/or the needed performance either.
Plus our chat is tied in with our group system, any user can form a community group and create their own private/public chat rooms and forums... coding integration for such things, and the subsequent maintenance, is a nightmare. I know, we did exactly that for many years: We used phpbb and SMF as forums, and VOC and phpchat as chat software.
I'm not saying that rolling your own is always the better thing to do, but for us it definitely was worth it.
For 2.0 we're using the Yii Framework because we want to focus on the actual application, not the internal plumbing. Yii gives us a flexibility that Drupal doesn't have, for Drupal is a CMS and Yii is truly just an application framework that gives you many common things for free while encouraging the creation of clean and maintainable code.