Drupal vs. Percussion CMS vs. Squiz Digital Experience Platform

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

Best suited for large organizations where everyone knows how to deal with Java in an increasingly Java unfriendly world. Said organization should be willing to pay a huge price for a piece of dinosaur technology

Incentivized

Working with a large amount of web content where there is a need to focus on related content.

• 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

• Separate CMS environment publishes to remote server environment - great for security
• Highly scalable
• Full scale workflow allows for custom routing, approving, etc..

Incentivized

• Speed and efficiency
• Roles and content control
• Related content

• 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

• One word: JAVA! We don't live in the 1990's anymore! An AJAX/DHTML environment seems a long time coming.
• Horrible end-user experience, learning curve. Our end users' inability to easily use the archaic, Java-based interface, means they send the web developer their content requests. This creates a huge bottleneck and completely defeats the purpose of a CMS.
• Image mangement and integration with content is aweful and time consuming. An image processing tool called ImedImage was developed for Percussion at one point, and left completely stagnant with very little support.
• Implementation is extremely complicated, given the complexity of the system. Sure, scalability is a good thing, but there is very little out-of-the box function. Don't expect to implement a site as quickly as with other CMS platforms.

Incentivized

• User Interface was good but heavy, with Java powering the backbone I recall finding this somewhat troublesome at the time.

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.

I don't work with Squiz any more so it's difficult to say, that said, the site is still running on the same CMS so obviously it's still considered a great platform

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

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

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

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%

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

No contest. I can't wait to get off of Percussion CMS.

Incentivized

Easier to work with

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

• 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

• We are locked into Percussion CMS simply due to the expense and complexity of migrating to another solution (and the lack of time and budget to do so). I long for the day when I am no longer required to support Percussion CMS, to say the least.

Incentivized

• Having a single powerful CMS platform that would integrate a number of organisations that had recently merged - Squiz was a big part of bringing our web architecture together gracefully.
• Increased employee efficiency