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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Jekyll
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Jekyll is an open source static site generator useful as a blog publishing system.
Front-End Web Developer, Office of Mediated Education
Chose Drupal
WordPress would be the best alternative to Drupal that I've seen, but in my experience, Drupal is better at complex websites that need a lot of customization. WordPress would be much better suited for a blog than Drupal.
I only briefly looked at Joomla, and I wasn't impressed.
Jekyll has a much lower technical overhead in terms of server and hosting requirements to launch a site, but at the same time has a much more technical "interface" and doesn't have the dynamic capability, user management, or permission system as a standard CMS like Drupal or Wor…
The big alternatives to Jekyll are of course things like WordPress or Drupal, but they are almost something completely different: a full-blown CMS with a backend language and a database. Jekyll loses some of the niceties of these CMS solutions, like easily updating content from …
Overall, I would give my rating of Drupal a 7/10 because there is an easy user experience for those without a website background but there is some technology work required to build more website capabilities that aren't as user-friendly. Drupal is specifically well suited to update content (like changing Relationship Manager cards when there is employee turnover), post announcements (putting up a holiday banner to let our customers know the dates we will be closed over Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc., and creating a sophisticated website hierarchy of pages (for our firm, several dropdowns depending on if you're looking for personal banking, business banking, investment banking, about us, etc.).
Jekyll is great for people who aren't intimidated by editing HTML, CSS, and Markdown files, people who are on a shoestring budget, and people who want a blazing fast website. Jekyll may not be the best option for people who aren't interested in editing their websites in a text file and would rather have a WordPress-esque back-end from the beginning.
It has excellent security features and consistent updates.
It allows for extensive customization with the integrated themes and core code, especially when you first install it. This allows our dev team to get creative with marketing initiatives.
There is a large online community of Drupal users that consistently help answer any questions and issues
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%
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.
Jekyll is integrated into GitHub Pages, which made it an easy choice. Using Jekyll was also easier as there's not really a server or a database to configure and you can just get things started from day one. Running and verifying content changes locally for developers is super efficient as Jekyll runs locally, too.
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.
