Likelihood to Recommend Well, I'm definitely biased, I've been working with Drupal for 12+ years, and I can say it's appropriate for any size/scale of a project, whether it's a small catalog website or a huge corporation. If I want to dial it down to a specific use case, Drupal is best what most customers/clients that have high-security standards, and need to have extensive editorial experience and control over their website's architecture. Due to its core design, Drupal can connect with each part of its own and any external third-party resources quite easily. For a less-suited scenario, I might say that if you don't have enough budget to get proper work done, sometimes just using
WordPress with a pre-designed theme might sound better to you, but if you have the budget and the time, always go with Drupal
Read full review In my experience, Jahia Digital Experience Platform as a CMS platform is excellent when you have a large amount of content that needs to be customized. It is also good for when you have templated content that has minor variations. I would say it is less appropriate when the content has numerous mathematical computations, or a large amount of business logic that comes into play with data processing.
Read full review Pros Content Types... these are amazing. Whereas a more simplistic CMS like Wordpress will basically allow you to make posts and build pages, Drupal 8 gives you the ability to define different types of content that behave differently, and are served up differently in different areas of the website. Extensibility... it scales, ohhhh does it scale. They've really figured out server-side caching, and it makes all the difference. Once a page has been cached, it's available instantly to all users worldwide; and when coupled with AWS, global redundancy and localization mean that no matter where you're accessing the site, it always loads fast and crisp. Workflows... you have the ability to define very specific roles and/or user-based editorial workflows, allowing for as many touchpoints and reviews between content creation and publication as you'll require. Read full review Content management: It is very easy to update text, images, files and videos even for a non technical user. Multi-site Management: It has a robust multi-site management capability, It helps in maintaining multiple websites with consistent branding. Digital asset management: It is easier to store organize and retrieve images, videos and documents. It has a great built-in analytics and reporting feature. Read full review Cons Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on. Steep learning curve, but worth it Read full review It lacks the ability to manage multiple versions of a page or content in general. The back office interface sometimes encounters bugs or display problems. It's difficult to keep pre-production sites up to date in terms of content compared to production, because the time required to import/export sites is very long once the site is rich in content. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review I would not use Jahia as it proved too complex for our needs and didn't help our over goal of customer satisfaction. Along with the man hours to build and execute, it wasn't worth the hassle
Read full review Usability It's a great CMS platform and there are a ton of plugins to add some serious functionality, but the security updates are too complex to implement and considering the complexity of the platform, security updates are a must. I don't want my site breached because they make it too difficult to keep it up to date.
Read full review The interface and ergonomics are designed to facilitate the use of the product. The creation of template is easy which allows to minimize the actions necessary for the provision of content.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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).
Read full review [I give it this rating because it] was up most of the time. There are so many scheduled reboots that I don't think it would be a good choice for a 95% SLA.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review It's stable after upgrade to Jahia 8. Not much server down so far
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review As I was saying, the support makes sure to be available for any question, or any technical point that we may need to discuss about. Moreover, whenever we have an issue with the platform they get alerted and also send us an email so that we are aware. We had multiple complex topics to work on in the past, but they always have been answering our question
Read full review In-Person Training 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.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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%
Read full review Alternatives Considered Drupal is community-backed making it more accessible and growing at a faster rate than Sitefinity which is a proprietary product built on .NET. Drupal is PHP-based using some but not all Symphony codebase. Updates for Drupal are frequent and so are feature adds.
Read full review Jahia provides a similar user experience to other CMS I have used in the past - it features a simple interface that makes navigating and learning how to use the platform easy and the ability to copy and paste content saves time and effort when building new pages. The ease in which you can manage the site in different languages is also a big plus!
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review You can create your own feature module and it can be resuable across the projects. The Java libraries is available for development of Tomcat or JSP
Read full review Return on Investment Drupal has allowed us to build up a library of code and base sites we can reuse to save time which has increased our efficiency and thus had a positive financial impact. Drupal has allowed us to take on projects we otherwise would not have been able to, having a further impact. Drupal has allowed us to build great solutions for our clients which give them an excellent ROI. Read full review Our once frustrated contributors are now happy to create content with Jahia Digital Experience Platform! Pages are snappy and bug-free, which wasn't always the case. Jahia Digital Experience Platform has mapped our complex organization into nice roles and permissions. All our external services were nicely integrated into a modern portal. Read full review ScreenShots Jahia Digital Experience Platform Screenshots