Clickability (discontinued) vs. Drupal vs. Modern Campus CMS

As a true content management system it is great for site and content creation. It does need some help when it comes to adding functionality for using modern code systems that require server side scripting. For a marketing or public company site, it is an ideal CMS. For a SAAS type site, there could be many road blocks.

If you want to set up a basic Not For Profit (NFP) Membership system and content base, Word Press is easier than Drupal. However, if you have specific needs that require a fair bit of customisation then Drupal is the best CRM available. If the webmaster is confident with PHP and SQL, Drupal allows a lot of creativity.

Incentivized

OU Campus is the best CMS product I've seen, especially when you have a large organization with less staff and resources. Also, its power, if one team likes marketing, handles all pages and that saves a lot of time and effort. I strongly like the components/snippets. Tags all dynamic modules.

• Easy to get going for a business that has tons of content they need to manage.
• Clickability offers development and design services so you don't really even need IT.
• No need to worry about server uptime, storage, bandwidth, etc you have all the reports at your fingers for what you are using.
• Simple template and content design system, easy to expand and add.
• Powerful CMS and settings with a design and programming guide provided.
• AkAMAI and Limelight CDN's can be used for powerful and fast loading in many regions.
• Debugging tools to see how long specific templates and content load is exceptional. One can narrow down that this specific template ran X number of times and took this look and had to be stopped at X number of time due to exceeding set limits.
• Having a built in Dev, Staging, Production environments for testing makes seeing new features and how they will integrate into your site seamless.

• Drag and drop functionality is easy to use
• Easy to switch between straight text and HTML content
• Ability to easily have multiple environments so that pages can be built in b/c-stage before they are approved and published
• Solid user experience where it's clear how to navigate the platform

Incentivized

• The JustEdit feature makes updating content a breeze. With a small staff, we rely on others to update their content. OU Campus makes it easy.
• Site-wide find and replace. I use the site-wide find and replace feature for all sorts of things - links, enrollment numbers, department names. It's really helpful.
• Customer service. The staff at OU Campus answers questions quickly and is always willing to discuss the most effective ways to take on new projects.

Incentivized

• Choosing ad size/placement should be easier than it is. Now, I have to re-create the whole thing.
• When you "save" anything a pop-up comes up that is redundant.
• Ad list only shows a limited number. It's not until you click on one and cancel it out, then you can see all the listings. A bit tedious and redundant.

Incentivized

• This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
• Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
• The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.

Incentivized

• Formatting. The page can sometimes look very differently when published than what it looks like while editing. Some improvements have been made in this area with version 10 however.
• Find and replace. The command+F needs to find text on the page while editing, not present an actual find and replace dialog box. At least give me the option to simply "find" the text I'm looking for. The dialog box just gets in the way most of the time.
• There is not a way to "unpublish" items. At least not a way that I can think of. I would like the ability to pull a page offline without deleting it. Seems like it should be done simpler.

Incentivized

As mentioned in the last questions we are going to use a competitor brand next year. I think the issues are trying to find and fix problems from the previous programer. The steep learning curve and lack of mobile and social sharing capabilities. Things that I like are the strength of the programing which comes with a trade off. The ease for those who don't know markup to make updates to the website. Clickability isn't the easiest and can be difficult to find the content that you are interested in. We will not be using it next year.

The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.

We renewed our contract with OmniUpdate-OU Campus for reasons previously mentioned and also the well-provided tech support received from the company.

My experience with Clickability has been mostly positive but there are a few areas for improvement. It's generally easy to learn and use on a daily basis. I can move fast and do my job with speed with needed. But there is some clunky functionality with targeting and page building. My rating would be higher if some improvements were made.

As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.

Incentivized

Once you've been training how to use it, it's really easy to use it on a daily basis

Incentivized

Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

Incentivized

I found that some agents were better then others, usually you have an account representative and that I would consider level 1 support. To get really complex answers you need to talk with an engineer.

As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

Incentivized

The support at OmniUpdate is one of the reasons we continued with the company when time for renewal of contract.

I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

Overall, it was pretty seemless to switch the sites over.

Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

Incentivized

The support team at OmniUpdate is available to assisting campuses with implementation

Many of other content management systems similar to WordPress need custom installation. The server costs and upgrades quickly add up. Clickability while expensive, eliminated the overhead of managing all the dependency needs for a CMS. Clickability also works with its clients to understand the business needs and proposes the solutions accordingly. They have a good support team.

Incentivized

Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.

Incentivized

Before using OU Campus Content Management System we were using Adobe's DreamWeaver suite for creating and maintaining web pages. The core web development environment was cumbersome to set up. Non-tech people also had trouble understanding how the web works and how web pages are created/maintained. OU Campus Content Management System solved all problems for us.

Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

Incentivized

• I know a big positive is the fact that it is always-on. We are the leading news corporation for our state, and in many markets, nationwide. We pride ourselves on our strong ethics in the community and thus need to exude reliability to maintain the trust of these communities. Having a website fail periodically erodes that reliable perception.
• It has allowed different areas of the company to approach our team and work in a cohesive manner.

• Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
• It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
• Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs

• The positive impact of OU Campus is that is has increased employee efficiency and improved customer service among staff and students.