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.
Drupal requires less to no coding abilities to spin up sites. Even if someone is preparing to develop sites that require technical know how then Drupal provides role based systems to seperate developers from content writers. Drupal 8 and 9 now have a vast array of plugins. Now …
WordPress for sure has a bigger community, a lot of paid extensions which sometimes is easier to purchase and get started, a lot of pre-designed templates to get you going, but nowadays with the scale of the projects we've been working with, and the need for custom-tailored …
We use both, for different projects (Joomla and Drupal). Drupal proved to be more robust, more secure and more integrable with PHP applications. Drupal requires a more senior technical team but allows for more complex activities. It's great if you have a medium to a large …
We first had a WordPress-based website, that evolved to a custom third-party developed content management system. In both cases, that involved additional costs for any change request, any security or any scalability need. WordPress didn't meet enterprise requirements. That also …
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.
Drupal is far more usable and stable than Joomla!, and the developer community support is significantly stronger. While Drupal is often compared to WordPress, they are fundamentally different platforms, and in most projects, it's very clear when the requirements are beyond what …
We did a comparison of Drupal against Joomla, WordPress, and Ingeniux. We found that its multiple themes available for web pages, user management, comment management, and form generation stands apart from its competitors.
I've used WordPress sparingly when helping a client with an existing website. I find it much less powerful and robust, and frankly confusing. The way WordPress websites are set up in the backend doesn't make sense to me after getting used to how Drupal is set up. They're …
Drupal is really the only well-supported open-source CMS that is designed for large, data-rich websites. There just really weren't any good alternatives. There are plenty of CMSs that excel at small to medium-sized websites. But for a large website with lots of structured data, …
Although Drupal is not the most used, it has great performance and is more used in professional projects. It allows us to expand without starting from scratch.
Security-wise and traffic-wise Drupal is built to handle a lot. While the other platforms mentioned ( mainly WordPress ) are great and have a large community, I would only use Drupal for an Enterprise level platform to build a website on. I first learned about Drupal about 10 …
Drupal supports lots of devices like Mac, Windows, Linux etc. easily, and it is an open source product so there's no cost required. Lots of other products require purchasing, costing a high amount. The support system of Drupal is also good in comparison to other products. The …
Drupal is certainly a more complex animal, comparatively. But its power lies in its flexibility, extensibility, and stability. And the API is fantastic. There's really nothing else like it.
I selected Drupal because of the simplicity upon going live. "Simple" is not the word I would use prior to the site going live though. I have used Jumla (which I believe was part of Drupal as one CMS about 12 or 15 years ago). Jumla is almost identical in capabilities to …
In my mind, Drupal and WordPress are the top open source CMSes, and I rarely recommend not going with an open source CMS. WordPress can be great, especially for single developers, but I find that the code structure and extensibility of Drupal makes it superior for many use …
I've used Squarespace and WordPress for other businesses, and Drupal was honestly selected due to cost. It does a good job of scaling across our organization - and many units have benefited from having a space to provide content. Squarespace is more modern, and WordPress may …
Drupal has strong role-based permissions for users, powerful content blocks for editing, and granular customizing options in their views. For a company or organization requiring a lot of customization, Drupal can be a really powerful tool. However, Drupal does require …
When selected, Drupal was the tool that had enough power to create a robust intranet while not being too overly complicated. It allowed for custom integrations that were developed from IT, and it was able to handle the mass amount of users we needed, many of whom are not overly …
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.
We have previously used WordPress, we found that the site is limited in its potential compared to Drupal. The biggest slow down we have seen is in the use of plug ins, unlike Drupal, WordPress experienced severe slowdowns. The user interface is rather slow and unrefined …
Drupal is similar to WordPress when discussing content management and WYSIWYG capabilities. That is where the similarities end from a functional standpoint. WordPress is a top contender for blog sites, whereas Drupal is for sellable content, i.e. products and services. Both …
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
