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Drupal has been widely used in a variety of industries and situations, proving itself as a robust and extensible platform that can fulfill …
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What is Drupal?
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…
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What is Drupal?
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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What is Drupal?
Drupal is a free and 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 common to content management systems. These include a dashboard with a menu management system, RSS feeds, page layout customization and themes to aid this, and system administration tools. Drupal offers access statistics, more advanced search features, caching and feature throttling (to improve performance if needed), descriptive URLs, multiple users with controllable privileges, access control and restrictions, and workflow tools (triggers). There are over 30,000 addons or modules to expand Drupal's functionality.
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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.
Reviewers rate Role-based user permissions and Mobile optimization / responsive design and Form generator highest, with a score of 10.
The most common users of Drupal are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Drupal has been widely used in a variety of industries and situations, proving itself as a robust and extensible platform that can fulfill specific needs. For example, Ericsson is leveraging Drupal to develop an internal application for accessing company policies and documents, including a news and events section. This showcases Drupal's capability to serve as an efficient tool for knowledge management within organizations. Similarly, Commercial Progression takes advantage of Drupal's integration capabilities with CRM and ERP systems to develop websites for various industries, demonstrating its flexibility in meeting diverse business requirements.
Another key use case for Drupal is creating uniform intranet sites across different operating units, enabling organizations to convey their identity and provide basic information consistently. This allows companies to maintain a cohesive brand image while providing essential resources to their employees. Additionally, non-technical staff can easily create and manage content using Drupal, addressing marketing web presence needs efficiently without extensive coding knowledge. This user-friendly aspect of Drupal makes it accessible to a wide range of users within an organization.
Furthermore, Drupal proves invaluable in the realm of website development, offering a quick and flexible solution for building test sites or serving as a content management system for clients who require rapid website development with built-in control. Its ability to handle large volumes of content makes it suitable for managing customer service articles, translation services, and industry-standard features like views and revisioning. The platform is also chosen by developers specializing in Drupal due to its ease of use in quickly getting sites up and running for clients.
In the educational sector, the University of Edinburgh's Web Interfaces team has utilized Drupal to develop bespoke web solutions with a focus on security and scalability. This use case highlights Drupal's suitability for academic institutions seeking reliable and customizable solutions for their web development needs. Moreover, Drupal has proven its worth in the online education space, with approximately 95% of websites designed to market and recruit online degree programs being built with this platform.
Overall, Drupal offers a versatile range of use cases, from powering corporate intranets to supporting website development across various industries. Its capacity for customization and its ability to handle diverse content needs make it a compelling choice for organizations of all sizes.
Extensibility and Customization: Users highly appreciate the extensibility and customization options provided by Drupal's wide range of contributed modules. Many reviewers have stated that this flexibility allows them to tailor the software to their specific needs, enhancing the overall value of the platform.
Cost-effectiveness: The open-source nature of Drupal is seen as a major advantage by users, with many stating that it eliminates ongoing licensing costs. Reviewers mention that this cost-effectiveness makes Drupal an attractive option for those on a tight budget.
Strong Community Support: Users highly value the fantastic open-source community surrounding Drupal. Several reviewers have mentioned that they appreciate the community's readiness to help and provide solutions to any problems encountered. This support system is seen as invaluable, ensuring users have necessary assistance and resources to overcome challenges while using the software.
Intuitive User Interface: Some users have mentioned that the user interface of Drupal is not intuitive and requires technical expertise to use effectively. They feel that the platform lacks a WYSIWYG text editor, making it necessary to have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS style sheets to customize the site.
Complicated Development Process: Several users have found the development process in Drupal to be complicated and difficult to learn, even for experienced developers. They express that development is hard to learn and complicated, which can be challenging for those with prior experience in web development.
Time-Consuming Maintenance: Users have expressed that maintaining Drupal websites can be time-consuming due to frequent updates and patches that need to be installed. The continuous need for maintenance can become burdensome as it requires allocating additional time towards keeping the website up-to-date.
Security Concerns with Plugins: Some users have raised concerns about the security of Drupal websites, attributing it to the large number of plugins available from numerous developers. They find it harder to ensure site security due to this vast variety of plugins, often requiring careful vetting and monitoring.
Resource-Intensive Infrastructure Requirement: Users mention that compared to other content management systems (CMSs), Drupal requires a more powerful infrastructure. This makes it more resource-intensive in terms of hardware requirements, potentially increasing costs for hosting and server resources.
Steep Learning Curve with Drupal 8: The learning curve associated with Drupal has been highlighted by users as a challenge, particularly concerning its eighth version. They perceive Drupal 8 as significantly different from previous versions, complicating the learning process further.
Confusing Back-end User Interface: Some users find the back-end user interface of Drupal confusing and clunky. They express difficulties navigating through menus or locating specific settings within the interface, leading them to consider it less user-friendly than desired.
Configuration Changes Hidden in Menus: Users mention encountering certain configuration changes hidden within menus where they may not expect them. This can make it challenging for users to locate and modify specific settings, potentially causing frustration or inefficiencies.
Time-Consuming Setup and Configuration: The process of setting up and configuring Drupal has been mentioned as time-consuming by users. They express that it requires technical skills and knowledge, making the initial setup a potential pain point. Additionally, some changes may require IT assistance and might not be applied immediately.
Limited Ease of Use: While Drupal is generally considered relatively easy to use, some users note that it still requires development skills. They advise that installation and upgrading processes should be handled by someone with technical expertise to avoid potential troubles during these procedures.
Users have made several recommendations based on their experiences with Drupal. Here are the three most common recommendations:
- Start with a theme if you don't have much time to learn the system.
- Avoid using too many plugins and have someone on-site for day-to-day maintenance.
- Consider other options for CRM or shopping cart functionality.
Overall, users believe Drupal is a robust CMS platform but recommend starting with a theme for quicker setup, limiting plugin usage, and considering alternative options for CRM and shopping cart functionality. These recommendations aim to optimize the user experience and ensure efficient management of websites built on Drupal.
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(26-50 of 77)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
September 28, 2018
Drupal: A Definite Recommend!
Drupal is the main development platform that we use at my company. We currently use versions 7 and 8. We are in the process of migrating all version 7 instances to version 8. We use Drupal to house and promote all of our various assets, promote events, track registrations via integration. Drupal is used by various departments within my organization but is run by one main group whereas all of the others are supporting it. Drupal is used to both promote our products as well as serve as a singular housing unit for all resources, forms, event information, and company information.
- Drupal integrates very well with all of our technology, ie. Salesforce, Marketo, etc.
- Drupal's interface allows us to easily update and push out new material with ease.
- Drupal is a very well known technology that has made it easy for us to find talent that is familiar with it.
- There are certain limitations in the amount of information that can be passed from Drupal to Salesforce, specifically in areas of how long viewers are on a particular page.
- Drupal uses up a ton of memory space, due to how large our sites are, it has been costly to add in the required hardware.
September 27, 2018
Drupal Does What Is Intended
My company needed a new website that was responsive, allowed for an easy to manage content management system, and flexibility/scalability. Due to Drupal being open source and having the ability to create templates that are customized - it solved many of our business problems. Some of those problems being; dynamic response, loading forms, creating custom landing pages.
- Content storage
- Easy backend navigation
- Ability to add users with ease
- WYSIWYG
- Rich Text Editor
- Containers
September 11, 2018
Drupal is the 777 of CMS'
Drupal is used to manage our primary website. It is managed by the Marketing department, without any involvement from the IT department. It serves as a quick, effective and relatively inexpensive way to manage over a thousand pages of content. In addition, the direction towards API first has significant savings, allowing us to build a solution that integrates many technologies into one interface for content editors.
- Content Management
- Document and Media Management
- SEO Management
- API Integration
- Easy to manage updates
- User management
- Can be extremely difficult to ramp up to production
- If built poorly, nearly impossible to fix without a full rebuild
- Drupal core updates can be a pain in the butt.
March 03, 2018
Drupal: Titan of Open Source
The global education services division is driven by websites designed to market and recruit online degree programs for prospective students and consumers. 95 percent of those websites are built with Drupal. Through these websites we gather information vital to the company's business strategies.
- Drupal is an open source CMS and has a vibrant community supporting it.
- Drupal's core package offers a great out-of-box product that can easily be modified to meet any business need.
- The community dedication to contrib modules is second to none. There's a module for just about everything you could imagine, want, or need on a website.
- Excellent administrative framework and user-based interface allows for custom role creation and specific access levels based on credentials.
- Being open source, there isn't a company solely dedicated to it, which can sometimes represent challenges for bugs associated with specific modules.
- Frequent releases require upgrading to maintain support for active components.
- Flexibility and options are vast, but not necessarily intuitive for the non-experienced or web novices.
- Requires a developer.
February 05, 2018
Graphic Designer and Web Designer's Drupal Review
Our college and entire university have been using Drupal to create web pages. It provides an easy web working environment for both web professionals and non-professional users. For the professional users, you can work directly in a code mode and write your own CSS style. For the non-professional users, you can use the default functions and use it as simply as you are using a Word application. Drupal also gives different users different roles. You can assign a less experienced user a lower role, he/she can draft the initial page and wait for an experienced user to approve and publish the page.
- Work fine for both code writers and non-experienced web content creators
- Easy to start with
- Easy to manage different users
- WYSIWYG editor
December 13, 2017
If you love happy, giddy developers...
Drupal hosts our main public website, which has hundreds of thousands of users visit it monthly. It is being used by the marketing department and we chose it for its flexibility and ease of use. We were stuck with an old CMS that was rigid and a pain to work with. Our developers hated it and it prevented us from being nimble. Drupal solves those problems for us.
- Drupal separates data from presentation, which is very important when you are trying to build a website. It is great at letting the back end developers focus on data structure and the front end focus on presentation.
- You can change anything you need to, or find someone who already has. Since its open source you can find a developer who can help you with a problem.
- Its been around for a long time and there are many mods that have been created to solve many problems.
- It can be daunting to a developer who has no experience with Drupal at first. There is a learning curve and it may not be for everyone.
- Because there are so many choices for mods and add-ons its hard to pick which ones are the best.
- There are not as many people with Drupal 8 experience out there even though its been over a year since its release.
December 12, 2017
Drupal - flexible CMS with a huge community behind it
We used Drupal to create our own custom learning management system for the company, which helped us digitally distribute our software packages and limit the amount of time users had access to them, thus making them subscription products, which was something we were never able to do before. Customers loved the move because it did away with having to use a DVD disc in their computer and remember to bring it with them when they needed their kids to do their homework. We also made a secure online space for kids under the age of 13 to interact with their teachers on homework and class discussions, thus adding another digital layer of interface between teachers and kids for better communication.
- User management was great in Drupal, we were able to create custom roles for users and assign them special permissions based on their roles.
- Customization of Drupal was a real strength, we were able to customer our site to look exactly the way we wanted and mocked up in our early brainstorming sessions. There is a vast array of add-ons available to Drupal for themes and customization that anyone can take advantage of.
- Add-on modules were the real strength of drupal, because anyone in the world could develop and offer new add-on functionality for drupal and those developers could share it with the whole drupal community and help each other advance the add-on module together.
- The community is really the best part of Drupal, there is a huge pool of developers all contributing and helping each other to advance Drupal with new features and better security all the time.
- The one thing that Drupal could improve on are the upgrade paths for updating the system between each major release of the software, when drupal moved from version 7 to version 8, most people could not do the upgrade for many months, while they waited on the add-on modules they used to be updated to work with version 8 as well. I think involving the module developers earlier on, on new major update releases could help fix this.
- Add-on modules can sometimes be slow to update or fix problems because some developers aren't that active in updating their add-on modules
- Some module developers build modules that only serve their own immediate need and are not willing to update or advance their modules to expand its functionality to serve others similar needs. Other developers are usually offered to take over and customize the project for their own needs but sometimes the documentation for existing modules can be lacking, depending on the developer.
March 07, 2017
DSMM Guru
The program that I manage within the school of medicine uses Drupal to maintain our individual website. I manage and maintain all edits, updates, and links on our web page. We use our webpage to provide knowledge to potential students who are interested in participating in our 9-month training program.
- Easy access and more often than not, our student's are able to navigate through our webpage and find exactly what information they need.
- Drupal Customer Service agents are extremely helpful, polite and knowledgeable.
- Direct communication on edits/updates to software to the customer (myself, etc.) rather than our IT department that doesn't always relay information.
March 06, 2017
Drupal: Still the One for Robust Site-Building
In my work with a digital agency, I was building Drupal sites, adding features or modifying existing sites, or debugging Drupal sites for our customers. It was a foundation for most of our site building projects and was used across the company. Drupal's importance as a content management system cannot be overstated as it remains one of the most powerful tools for building robust sites that deliver rich, complex content types with well-designed layouts. It abstracts away much of the code that would need to be written to wireframe a website and allows one to focus on the higher level requirements of the site including design, content management, user management and security without having to spend hours writing baseline HTML, CSS and PHP code.
- Drupal has the most flexible and robust site building tools available for quick site-building; it is possible to have a Drupal site up and running in your local development environment within a minute and immediately get to work.
- It expertly uses a modular approach to extending your site, with the Drupal core shipping with most of the ones you will need, but with a vast array of modules available in the Drupal space to quickly and easily add features such as Google Maps, powerful layout designers, block management, menus, and more. Many times you can install a theme that fits the needs of your site and greatly reduce the amount of styling necessary to get a terrific-looking site, as well as the amount of JavaScript necessary to create things like slideshows.
- It makes user management a breeze with the ability to easily create new user accounts and assign roles that govern access to content types and overall site management. It is therefore much easier to hand off a Drupal site to your customers and be confident they won't break it, while still finding it easy to manage their content.
- Drupal's flexibility comes at the cost of having a fairly large footprint. It can take up much more space than a site developed using JavaScript, CSS and HTML that has been optimized; it is much harder to reduce the folder size of your Drupal site due to the number of moving parts required.
- Drupal has many dependencies that can conflict with your local development environment at times and it can therefore be cumbersome to set up a Drupal site on a new machine or one that has other development environments on it that may use different PHP versions or paths to the PHP executable.
- Drupal lags behind WordPress in terms of the number of themes and modules available, due to its smaller user base.
- It has a much higher learning curve than WordPress, and to use it to the utmost you will need to pick up some degree of understanding about SQL, PHP, CSS, and Drupal components.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Drupal is an integral tool in every aspect of our business. Commercial Progression has been developing Drupal powered websites for a variety of industries since 2007. We love being a contributing member of the supportive and vast opensource community that has come together to build this amazing content management system. Of course we leverage Drupal to manage our front facing business websites, but it is also powerful enough to integrate with our CRM and build back office business management tools for ERP systems. Drupal excels at delivering enterprise grade integrations with large organizations that have a long range technology roadmap. Being able to scale with the complexity of any web development project makes Drupal the ideal tool for handling the most challenging web application projects.
- The Drupal core ships with a granular, field level content construction toolset. The very popular views module is now part of the core Drupal CMS and enables the creation of complex content types, it's way more than a blogging tool.
- Drupal is especially adept at integration with enterprise grade CRM and ERP systems. Because all of the data in Drupal is naturally available for mapping at the field level, there is a ready environment for connecting to restful API systems.
- Drupal scales exceptionally well with multisite and multiuser environments. Large universities can standardize on a common codebase of Drupal and then roll it out to the entire campus. Individual colleges can customize their themes and content but do not need to worry about figuring out their own module stack.
- Drupal is complex, it will take time and expertise to shape it into the tool you need it to be for your use case. WordPress can be installed and is ready to go for blogging out-of-the-box, but Drupal will need more setup up front to build out the functionality needed.
- Finding strong Drupal expertise can be challenging for companies. Although the developer community is over a million strong, there are still few companies that truly have an expert Drupal developer on staff.
- Drupal can be overkill for small websites with just a few pages or limited functionality. Many new flat file responsive tools can do well to build a basic brochure site without the overhead of a CMS like Drupal.
- Security is an ongoing struggle for all users of opensource CMS solutions. If you choose Drupal for your website, you will need a plan for security updates to ensure you are one step ahead of the hackers.
September 23, 2016
Drupal as a framework
We are a small department (in a big non-profit organization) that supports organization's international and domestic development projects through consulting and implementation of ICT solutions. We develop websites and web applications such as online databases, digital libraries, data collection and visualization platforms, communities of practice and many more for these projects. We switched to Drupal in 2011 and never looked back. For most of the websites and applications we develop Drupal is a perfect fit. The development on Drupal is very efficient and most of the time is as easy as selecting right modules and configuring them to work together. In 90% of cases we don't have to write a single line of custom code. We do create custom themes based on custom design though.
- Databases. Drupal is a great choice for building an online database. It has great tools for creating advanced data structures out of the box. With help of a few contributed modules the possibilities are limitless.
- Digital Libraries. Drupal is also a perfect solution for digital libraries. With integration with search engines such as Solr, faceted search, and document preview we can build searchable and filterable digital libraries of any scale.
- Websites. Being a content management system in the first place Drupal is a perfect platform for websites - large to small. It's extendable with more than 12,000 open source modules that can do almost anything. There is a famous answer to almost any question in Drupal community - "there is a module for that".
- Content management. Content management is perhaps the strongest part of Drupal. You can easily create and place your content anywhere on your website, reuse and aggregate it in many different ways.
- There are not many areas where Drupal needs improvement that haven't been already address in Drupal 8. However there is one feature I want to mention that could have been implemented better -- the Forum (or discussion board). Although with a few contrib modules and a little of custom code the forum functionality in Drupal can be fine tuned to be almost as powerful as Google Groups, it requires a lot of effort to make it work as expected.
- Out of the box theme in Drupal does not look professional enough. Most of developers will want to replace it with something else. Thankfully there are hundreds of free themes available for Drupal for free, and many more can be purchased online.
August 09, 2016
Drupal review
We are a digital agency that serves some clients who require Drupal expertise. They either come to us for help with Drupal, or we recommend Drupal to them based on their business needs. It solves the issue of providing a powerful and extensible open source CMS.
- Drupal provides a robust and powerful open source CMS platform. Due to this, it has a wide community of supporters and contributors and a vast library of modules that have already been produced.
- As of Drupal 8, Drupal provides good admin tools for configure data and content architecture and relationships.
- Drupal's admin section, especially before Drupal 8, can be fairly confusing to navigate. This is tough for developers as well as content authors.
- Drupal traditionally has been a little constrictive with regards to front end templating, although it has gotten easier over the years.
August 03, 2016
Great tool if set up properly
We use it for our main website that is our marketing tool. This website is hosted separately from any other application we have because it has to be available during an emergency. It is really a place to attract customers.
- Easy to manage users, access, etc.
- Simple to use (for regular users)
- Fast platform if set properly
- Development for it takes time
- Initial setup can be pain
- Editing sometimes may not be applied immediately and requires IT assistance
July 28, 2016
Drupal - Standardizing Our Intranet Sites
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Drupal was the software used to create many of our organization's intranet sites. It was used across the majority of the organization. Each operating unit used it to create sites that conveyed who they were, the work they did, and other basic information. We used it so the operating units' sites would be uniform in their look and feel. Consequently, information would be be found in predictable locations across the operating unit sites.
- You don't need to be a developer to use Drupal. You just need to learn its functions.
- We were able to train people with various non-computer backgrounds to use Drupal. It can be learned by a range of people who are not "technical".
- Drupal sites can include APIs, webforms, slideshows, parent and child pages, and more.
- The option to compare older site page versions with the current version could be easier to decipher from a visual standpoint.
- It would be great if the various customizable features included descriptions of how they function for the many non-technical users who work on Drupal.
- It can be tough for users to find previously added slides (in the slideshow carousel) to edit them.
July 25, 2016
Drupal User, but not Drupal Lover
We utilize Drupal as the backend CMS for a website. It was implemented by the website design firm and handed over to us once the design process was completed, so we manage it ourselves now. It was basically implemented as a way to update the site without directly editing the HTML and to provide some additional functionality, such as user account management (website logins) and some basic scheduling.
- Drupal has a wide range of plugins, allowing for a huge amount of customization within the platform.
- Being that there is a free version, it's very affordable.
- The platform is not easy to upgrade in order to keep up with security updates.
- The large number of plugins makes the product a bit complex to deal with without some kind of outside consulting or significant programming experience.
May 03, 2016
Drupal is a CMS on steroids
Drupal is our main CMS/framework for our complex web solutions (in-house) and to develop websites that require advance data relationship for our customers. Websites starting from simple corporate directories to web apps that rely on data structure and data relationships are well served by this powerful CMS. For small or very basic websites we use some more basic software because Drupal is too much power for basic web tasks.
- Create and manipulate data to show it on different views, queries and sections. It is like a WEB CMS like you can do it on a Database with a simple interface.
- Multiple content types, fields, relationships created over a strong, yet simple to use, backend.
- Great community support
- Ease to develop over the Drupal framework. Well documented.
- Open source
- It needs a more powerful infrastructure vs other CMSs
- GUI is great but could be improved.
- Themes are not as usable as some on other CMSs
- Learning curve is not simple because of its complexity.
April 18, 2016
Drupal is worth checking out.
We offer Drupal to our end users as a solution for creating a web site.
- Drupal has a large user base which means that there is plenty of supporting documentation available for learning its usage.
- Drupal has a large user base which means finding a developer to customize Drupal functionality is going to be easier because more talent is available and that talent is already familiar with the code.
- Drupal is fully customizable because it is open source and written in PHP, which is easily one of the most popular programming languages for web.
- Some users may find the interface complicated to use.
- Some users may not understand how to backup their Drupal instance properly or how to restore it if something bad were to happen.
- Some users will not understand the importance of keeping the software up to date and may be at risk for a hacked web site. Note: This is not a Drupal specific issue, all open source and arguable all software that does not get updated regularly may become vulnerable. However, automation in updates and backups is something most all modern pre-fab web apps have room for improvement. Most users just want to turn on their web site administration and generate content, not worrying about updates or backups.
My company is a digital agency that specializes in building and managing content management systems for clients. We primarily recommend Drupal as a solution, and use it for our own company website because of its flexibility as a CMS. While we do use other platforms and software within the company and externally for marketing purposes, from a developer's standpoint, Drupal is a crucial part both for managing our own website and in providing a great solution for clients.
- It's the most flexible CMS I have worked with, including other open source solutions and proprietary.
- The development community is invaluable. Unlike some CMSs, drupal developers are all about the big picture when it comes to building features, and work together to create a solid solution, rather than trying to sell options that may or may not be a good fit for what you need.
- Drupal is open source, which means anything really is possible in terms of development. It has very few limitations when building custom websites, and the only road block tends to be the amount of time or money available to spend on a solution.
- If all you want is a simple brochure site and blog, it may not be the best choice. While it is fully capable of doing both, it may take longer to set up than a simple WordPress or Squarespace type site. On the other side, if you do plan on building out and customizing a site it may be worth the consideration in the long run since this is where it shines.
- For development the learning curve can seem steep. Because it's such a robust system that offers so much in terms of capabilities, it may take a while to get a full handle on everything.
March 18, 2016
Drupal with Openatrium
Drupal is used for our intranet site across our entire organization, which uses a package called Open Atrium running on Drupal.
- Drupal has a powerful backend that seems to be very stable.
- Drupal has a lot of online resources for support.
- Drupal has a user friendly web interface that allows for most configuration changes in a user-friendly way.
- Drupal is fairly slow and requires a lot of horsepower to run.
- Some configuration changes are hidden in menus where they may not be expected.
- Drupal seems to require more regular maintenance than other systems.
March 18, 2016
Drupal - A beginner's choice, a developer's addiction.
By using Drupal, being it is a CMS, we have been able to start somewhere in the middle, rather than starting from scratch, and expand it to our business needs. Expandability is the key here, unlike other CMSs, Drupal can be expended to any scale, which allows us to add complex web applications on top of a very secure and sophisticated system.
- A very large and strong community. There are modules available for almost everything, and a great deal of knowledge shared by individuals on different forums.
- Expandability to the highest scale. The way the entities such as Users, Nodes and Taxonomy are designed, there is no limit to stretch the bar, and connect entities to each other.
- Regular security updates prevents you from any vulnerability.
- I haven't been able to test Drupal 8 yet, and most of the things we had wished for has been added to Drupal 8, so I am unable to comment.
Drupal is the core platform supporting all of our web properties and is part of the long term plan for internal and external facing sites. Drupal provides an extensible base for creating customized solutions with a lower initial effort while keeping our maintenance footprint small.
- Integrations with third party systems either through contrib modules directly addressing the integration, or a rich API and services model that supports simple extension.
- Team abstraction - The architecture of the platform lends itself well to a separation of concerns aligned with many different corporate organizations (separate frontend/backend/theming/services).
- Multi-site/tenant - While the platform has some hiccups to implementation of a multi-tenant solution it is fully possible to make any solution work.
- Theme integration is limited to PHPTemplate in Drupal 7, which can cause a number of issues with team composition.
- A mySQL backend represents a scalability bottleneck.
March 18, 2016
Drupal review
Drupal is currently used across our university as our main website platform. Because of its ease of use, it was a good choice compared to the previous platform that was being used.
- With basic HTML knowledge, this platform is easy to use.
- Easy to create customized forms.
- Concept of blocks is hard to comprehend and use.
- Limited in how you can setup the look of your site although these may be restriction personalized at our university.
March 18, 2016
My experience with Drupal
I have developed some sites using Drupal in the past, and I maintain some of them today. What I do is to apply updates on the core or the modules when it's necessary. I also help when changes are required in the theme or when implementing new functionalities that require adding/editing content types, taxonomies or modules.
- CMS
- Theming
- Modules
- Performance
- Database
- Language
March 10, 2016
Drupal - The Best CMS You're Not Using
In a previous position, we used Drupal for our website and built Drupal sites for clients. We found Drupal to be more secure, manageable, customizable and [provided a more] rock solid performance than WordPress sites that were used in the past.
- Drupal is extremely customizable. If you have a little bit of programming know how, the root files can be edited to fit the need of a project. The modules (plug-ins) off modular expansion.
- Drupal is fast and loads pages faster than WordPress or Joomla. It also uses less system resources than the other two CMS platforms.
- Drupal is technically advanced. Many find this intimidating, but in reality, if you want more out of the CMS instead of loading it down with plugins, programming directly in pages, the logical, modular layout of building the site is amazing.
- Drupal is flexible. It can be used for a simple blog or an enterprise ecommerce store. Drupal has the power and sophistication to do it all.
- With Drupal 8, a lot of the issues with Drupal have been fixed or moving in the right direction. Examples were mobile readiness, responsive design, more user friendly building of websites.
Used for the department news and information site and as a gateway to our other applications. We are migrating away from static HTML pages and Drupal will allow non-technical staff to put up announcements and news updates rather than developers.
- User management and roles.
- Open source with tons of available modules.
- Drupal 7 is not responsive by nature but can be addressed by adding responsive themes.
- Large learning curve to get the configuration and development practices down.
- Needs too many additional modules to be on par with some of the other CMSs available.