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 It's an extremely flexible solution. It can be a nightmare to work with if not properly planned out or fantastic if well thought out. If you have a team and an application owner with a plan it's a great option.
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 Ease of use Nice interface Web-based site manager 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 can be a bit buggy with media library management. The html editor can act pretty wonky sometimes with the html it translates things into. The navigation builder tool is pretty confusing. 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 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 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 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 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 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 I was not part of the decision process, but I was very happy with the choice to use TerminalFour.
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 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 Increased employee efficiency. Happier internal customers because changes are much easier than they used to be and we can often empower them to make their own changes to their websites. For our application owner it's become a huge project that consumes all of his time. Not ideal but it's working for now. Knowledge sharing the more intricate pieces can be really difficult. Read full review ScreenShots Terminalfour Digital Engagement and Web Development Platform Screenshots