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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Symfony
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Symfony is a PHP framework from French company SensioLabs.
Drupal is head-and-shoulders above WordPress in terms of extensibility and community support, in great part because it is completely open-source. I would recommend it in almost every case over WordPress. (WP is only better if you already know that system well, and your end …
As mostly all Drupal fellows says: "I came for the code quality and stayed for the Community". Drupal has a huge community that cares about the code quality, testing and engage developers to follow best programming practices. This improves both Drupal quality and your …
We've compared Symfony to Laravel, Zend, Drupal, and Silex (as well as to pure PHP) and it was so far the most convenient tool for enterprise scalable products. Among all compared, Laravel was next in line in terms of the convenience and ease. Drupal used to be popular, but now …
Symfony has become such a standard that many frameworks which previously may have been seen as competition, are actually adopting Symfony components to allow them to focus more on what makes their solution unique. Drupal 8 has replaced much of its low-level internal code with …
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
Any small project which you want to have ready in a couple of hours would be probably a bad candidate for using Symfony. Even the most seasoned senior developer can easily spend hours or days creating a small MVP with Symfony. While Symfony's learning curve isn't necessarily bad and will depend a lot on the architectural knowledge of the developer itself, because of the modularity required by Symfony you will need to spend a significant amount of time coding. If you are looking for a quick project, perhaps this framework isn't the best solution. Robust applications can benefit from Symfony's architecture. I have participated in projects on different industries including lead generation, marketing and even some micro-services for other industries which use Symfony. Because of how thorough the framework has been architected, you will have a reliable solution.
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.
Sonata Admin for Symfony is very versatile and we've used it for both the admin part of our website (even created a landing page constructor using it) and for the ERP system we've developed for inside use.
It is easy to learn if you know PHP and the community is quite large so you can easily find experts to help you with issues.
It's good for high-load projects. We have used it for the back-end of a custom affiliate marketing system that currently processes over 180 million requests per day.
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.
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.
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.
Symfony has a great following and finding relevant articles or looking into social channels for support is quite easy. I have no comments on any type of official support because I didn't ever need to look into it.
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 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.
Symfony has become such a standard that many frameworks which previously may have been seen as competition, are actually adopting Symfony components to allow them to focus more on what makes their solution unique. Drupal 8 has replaced much of its low-level internal code with Symfony components. Laravel utilizes much from Symfony and builds on it. CakePHP was my preferred framework over Zend and CodeIgniter, but now I typically prefer Symfony or Laravel depending on the type of application and complexity of what I'm doing.
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.
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.
One negative thing to point out of Symfony is how painful it is to migrate legacy or relatively old projects from previous versions of Symfony into newer versions.
Symfony projects are usually reliable and provide the results you need.
Performance can be an issue sometime depending on the kind of project you are working on. Symfony can have some issues with cache.
