Drupal vs. WYSIWYG Web Builder

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

If you prefer a PC/local development environment vs a fully online development tool, WYSIWYG Web Builder may be the best product available. If you are frustrated by bloated CMS systems that require constant updates and fixing of expired or conflicting plugins WYSIWYG Web Builder could be for you.

• 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

• Rapidly build website
• Builds site that load fast
• Allows for competely custom sites

• 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

• The depth of the product and available options can be a bit overwhelming when getting started

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.

This is my fourth year using WYSIWYG Web Builder and as many new releases. Each new release brings a staggering number of new features and enhancements. But the updates, fixes and new features are not limited to a once a year update. The product is updated with interium releases every few months.

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

The one reason for a 9 instead of a 10 is not a ding to the product itself. When first starting out the available options and tools are a bit overwhelming. You might be able to achieve the same visual result in multiple ways. As a new user you will need to learn which options work best for you. The online tutorials are good and there are a number of very good videos available on YouTube. The support from the forum is great. New users are treated with respect and provided support and guidance. (That is certainly not the case in many support forums) After fours years and dozens of websites I am still learning new features and tools for enhancing my customer's sites.

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

The developer actively replies to post on the support forum. It is typical to get a reply in a few hours. The support for this product exceeds any other product I have used in the past 25 years. In addition to rapid replies from the developer the support community is very active on the forum along with several forum members providing excellent training videos.

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

implementaion is simple. install the product and setup your hosting ftp settings.

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

I still use Xara for graphic design and image editing. But the web development in WYSIWYG Web Builder is far superior. Compared to online editors like Weebly, Wix, etc WYSIWYG Web Builder allows you to experiment with different options saved to different files. With the online builders you can't easily have 5 options to show a client. And you don't have backup copies in case the work you did, didn't work out.

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

• I am able to build truly custom sites for my customers
• I am able to build sites with less time and effort, resulting in competitive pricing
• I am able to build sites with less overhead, resulting in better profits