Drupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP that competes primarily with Joomla and Plone. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features such as account and menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.
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FastPIPE
Score10 out of 10
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FastPIPE is a construction and estimation software offering from FastEST, Inc.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It's absolutely well suited to anyone needing accurate piping takeoff and laboring estimates, with great reporting and up to date pricing. I love that I didn't need to spend time trying to update the price logs. It's easy to learn, and works well in a large or small environment, and lends itself to more than just estimating, but becomes a good project management tool as well. Fantastic software.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
FastPIPE was very fast to learn, very straight forward and user-friendly. It's easy to use and teach new interns and project engineers how to quickly takeoff sections to backup change orders or assist in heavy bid load.
It's fantastic at keeping up to date on price changes. I'd get updates often, and they were usually within 2-3% of our discount prices with local vendors. In the few instances it wasn't, FastPIPE was very easy to adjust or factor for project costs.
Is great at being able to pull up reports and graphs and track different materials and labor costs for factoring. We bid on a lot of high rise residential buildings, so we do takeoff by floor. It would give detailed reports per page as opposed to just a lump sum. Very detailed so it was easy to adjust per our project approach.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It was a trick or two learning how to upload prints correctly, I think that interface could be a bit easier, but it's already better than most of the competition.
Might be nice to have easier labor factoring, in case we want to pre-load our own instead of MCA time factors for piping labor
It would auto update upon opening occasionally. It's fairly fast, but I prefer to OK that in case I just need to come up with something quickly and don't want to wait.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
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%
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I've used the quote soft piping takeoff as well, and it's just not as easy to use or update. Basic methodology and interaface is similar, but it's more 'clunky' to use, is harder to keep updated and to upload PDF's for takeoff, and it's just not as streamlined or user friendly. Akin to comparing driving a truck to a sports car. The Fast Pipe is really smooth and easy to function in.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Best impact is time saved. It's so much faster to do bid takeoff and hit the ground running
Being able to 'draw in' on design-build and being able to print my takeoff has been helpful when turning the job over so the field install understands the approach taken to get the job.
Ease of use and learning has made it much more cost effective to bring new people up to speed.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
