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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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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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March 08, 2016
Drupal - Great when used the right way!
Drupal is one of the platforms we recommend for small to mid-sized engagements. We traditionally target the Drupal platform based on customer budget to high level scope being requested. We have used Drupal for any WCMS and have connected into ecommerce platforms.
- WCMS - simple and straightforward content management
- Modular - the fact that I can model Drupal into any shape I want is a huge selling point for us
- Community - the Drupal community is also a very strong selling point
- Open Source - This can be a strength and weakness based on the customer involved
- Time to Market - it is not as short as it is sold on some site. It takes time and knowledge to properly setup Drupal and tune it to get the optimal performance.
March 08, 2016
Don't Drop Drupal Just Yet
I was a Web Analyst at the University of Edinburgh. The Web Interfaces team develop bespoke web solutions for individuals and departments for the University of Edinburgh, and servicing external clients. This development team had a portfolio of over 30 website projects. My main tasks were to patch, backup, and deploy drupal instances. I also was involved in some back end development and configuration.
From my experience:
Drupal will create a secure and scalable website without prioritising aesthetics. Ease of Use and design is often sacrificed for speed, security and performance.
- Drupal's has built-in tools for automating SEO
- Large organisations and governments (White House) will use it for their content - it is trusted and secure.
- Correct Drupal development allows for custom content and extra features without too many complications
- Drupal makes performance a priority by having built-in caching.
- Users often find design to be problematic.
- Drupal’s themes sometimes do not offer mobile compatibility.
- Drupal has a steep learning curve. It developed for developers and therefore not user-friendly for the end-user or customer without training.
February 26, 2016
Used correctly, Drupal is the best CMF on the market.
We are an internet based media company delivering web content around health and wellness. Drupal is used by the editorial staff to create and curate the content. The engineering team extends Drupal's out of the box capabilities by creating additional modules.
- The community of developers is Drupal's biggest strength. The ability to reach out to others to get help and advice is invaluable.
- Form creation. Building forms to enter content is really straightforward and simple. The system does most of the work.
- It's highly extensible. The sky is the limit with Drupal. The question is not can we do something, the questions are when do you need it and how much are you willing to pay for it.
- The biggest issue Drupal has is that the rendering engines are slow. You almost certainly have to have a CDN if you want any type of user registration on your site.
- The second issue for me is that there are many ways to do things. There are of course the standard ways, but there are no real ways to enforce those standards. I feel like sometimes people build inefficient code and then blame Drupal for the slowness.
February 26, 2016
Drupal a Themer's Dream
Drupal is open source with a wide range of modules available to readily integrate with your project. There are a lot of communities that support Drupal if you want to get help. I have used Drupal in a number of my projects and was overwhelmed by its ease of use. I have been a designer and had worked with many of the Drupal themes; blueprint being the most commonly used by me. On any day, for a CMS solution, I would support Drupal.
- Many modules to choose and integrate with your project.
- Many themes to choose from and in case you want to build your theme, it lets you do that with ease.
- Open Source.
February 23, 2016
Drupal- How does it stack against the competition?
Drupal use is project based. Since we are an agency we use Drupal to add on to existing sites or suggest a build on Drupal if our clients need [to] match what the system can do.
- Displays content effortlessly.
- Has a huge community that supports the platform.
- Easy to transport database features from one environment to the next.
- Resource intensive.
- Learning curve isn't easy for beginners.
- Takes a long time to set up. Everything isn't out of the box.
February 20, 2016
Drupal. The CMS beast.
We currently do not use Drupal. We used to in the past but have gone to a in-house built CMS platform. We have a very specific clientele and Drupal was just too much for our needs.
- Large community of other developers building plugins for the CMS
- Site can easily expand when needed, so it makes it semi-futureproof.
- When built correctly, Drupal allows the client/admin to easily update/change/add content on the site.
- Has a very large learning curve. Especially with Drupal 8, which is a big change from previous versions.
- With the amount of plugins available by numerous developers it is harder to make sure your site is secure.
- The back-end UI has always very felt confusing and clunky.
Drupal is used both headlessly and natively for the Customer Service and Knowledge base teams, as the customer service article warehouse. It allows for a small development team to maintain 20k+ articles created and managed by multiple teams. Drupal is also used as the hub for internationalization of these articles, sent out to third-party translation services, and stored and retrieved through Drupal's I18N modules. A majority of features used are industry standards, like views, revisioning, and services. Drupal allows for maximum flexibility and extendability, with a massive amount of developmental leverage.
- Extendability. The hook system available keeps the code clean, maintainable between teams and projects, even bringing in contrib modules to use and extend.
- Prototyping. With such a large degree of community modules I'm often able to built up a feature prototype, by myself, in 4-16 hours.
- Community. Drupal has a large community for Q+A, as well as quality modules to extend your site functionality with minimal effort.
- Theming. Drupal as a system is well engineered, however the number and quality of the out-of-the-box themes (In comparison to WordPress) is smaller and lower-quality than I'd like.
- Learning Curve. Drupal education on use is a necessity when training new users, it isn't as intuitive as it could be and can often be a barrier to entry.
February 18, 2016
Drupal. An Evolving CMS
Our front-end applications are all built on Drupal 6/7. development and maintenance of these applications is really easy with Drupal. We have different products like, newsroom, journal and ecommerce platforms all built on Drupal and it provides an easy way to maintain these sites.
- Drupal is robust in terms of a content management system. It's easy and anyone can set up a basic commercial site within a small amount of time.
- Drupal's community is huge. Help is available with code snippets and blogs available all over the internet.
- IRC Chat is available for drupal community developers. We can get help from other drupal developers anytime.
- Drupal contrib modules needs some major work in terms of documentation. Some modules in the community do not have documentation and it's difficult to have them configured.
- Drupal at any given point of time, runs 60-70 queries on a page. This can be reduced to improve performance.
- Error handling can be improved, sometimes drupal just throws white screen of death, with no error message. This can be done in a better way.
December 24, 2015
Solid and Advanced Content Management with Drupal
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Drupal to address marketing web presence needs which reaches into various integrations. It's primary value is allowing rapid content creation and management by non-technical staff. Content can immediately be accessed by end-users, chiefly for the purpose of lead generation as well as industry and product knowledge.
- Enabled rapid feature development due to a mature community offering free extension modules. The scope of plugins is well balanced for focused purpose without bloat.
- Carefully configured permission/role structure allows people to manage content and publish live, keeping marketing fast paced.
- A suite of solutions allows deployment of code and configuration safely.
- Advanced staff is able to make changes via UI that might require developers in other systems.
- The platform is written in PHP, which is a ubiquitous/commodity service for web servers administrators and hosting providers.
- Native features like taxonomy vocabularies, content types, field structures, and permissions architecture are very mature.
- Admin user interfaces for installed modules are created by a wide-array of open-source developers. These can therefor be less cohesive than if they were all developed together.
- The Drupal platform allows live editing and configuration, so in order to be performant several layers of caching are required. These exist within Drupal but take time/expertise to setup properly.
November 11, 2015
A Powerful Content and Web Service Platform
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Drupal internally for our public-facing websites, as well as using it to build back-end management tools.
In addition, we provide Drupal support and services for thousands of companies and individuals.
In addition, we provide Drupal support and services for thousands of companies and individuals.
- Drupal's power comes from the ability to re-use content and parts of content in many different pages and contexts of the website.
- Drupal is also a powerful platform to integrate with other web services - I have a lot of experience integrating with Apache Solr, I've also help integrate it with CRM systems, event management systems, ecommerce services, and many more
- Starting from a bare Drupal site requires a lot of configuration, but there are also a growing number of pre-configured distributions that make it easy to start from a nearly complete solution for a specific use case.
- Because of its tremendous flexibility it's sometime difficult for new (or even experienced) user to be sure they are making the optimal choices of modules and configuration.
- Since Drupal is not code-compatible between major versions, community-provided modules are not always upgraded and that can make site upgrades challenging if you use one of those modules.
November 11, 2015
Drupalize it!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We utilize Drupal across the entire library. It is being used to search our catalog, place holds, manage checkouts and renewals, create events, allow customers to sign up for events, staff training, federated searching, program calendars, and more. Aside from our catalog software, we primarily utilize Drupal for everything else within the library. It has truly allowed us to create a single location to access data from all of our sources.
- Drupal is excellent for providing a single sign-on location for our users to access our catalog, utilize online databases, and register for events. In the past, they would have had 3 or more accounts to accomplish this and now it is all built right into the Drupal experience.
- We have revolutionized our library catalog from something that looked like it was built in 1990 to a very polished product that promotes user interaction and enhances usability.
- Our room booking and event management system is now fully integrated into Drupal which gives us much more granular use and control over how we utilize our resources. Customers can book a room for private study time, or register for a class on Excel 101. All of this is topped off with an excellent conflict management system that ensures our rooms are never double booked.
- Drupal is definitely missing some documentation for a lot of key modules. It would be great to enforce a minimum text introduction or preferably a short 5-min video clip to go over the ins and outs of each module.
- Compared to other CMS products, Drupal can be slow, if not given an adequate amount of server resources.
- It is sometimes difficult to stay up to date with the current version of Drupal when support for some key modules is lost after the last major release.
August 04, 2015
Drupal is powerful and versatile, but requires an investment in learning the technology
Drupal is being used for a public facing website for the organization, with private groups for certain members. It is used to provide news, announcements, and to create networking groups.
- Powerful right out of the box, infinitely expandable to address specific requirements.
- Powerful role-based user registration.
- Strong use of taxonomy.
- Versatile theming, well separated from the code layer.
- Easier way to create custom themes.
- While community support is very good, it it inconsistent. Many projects are poorly supported, could use more examples, maintainers should be rewarded for providing faster response to questions.
- When a major revision is released, it usually takes a year for all the supporting modules to be ready.
July 20, 2015
Drupal - the things that it does well
Our entire business is not centered around Drupal support; DOOR3 has made a considerable commitment to Drupal development but we use other platforms as specific to the needs of our clients' business needs.
Functionality that Drupal excels with:
Functionality that Drupal excels with:
- Analytics
- Localization / translation
- Commerce
- Publishing
- Customized Workflows
- Social network integration
- Content feeds
- Workflow: Drupal's permission system is very effective. That, in conjunction with Workbench moderation and organic groups can handle most workflow needs; from the most basic to the very complicated. There is also a distribution available that helps with this (Open Atrium).
- Analytics: Drupal's robust, field-able taxonomy terms can readily implement any number of tags to help your business understand what your viewers are doing and how to help them do it better.
- Developer workflow: Pushing configurations to environments, better diff tools.
July 17, 2015
Drupal: Climb the Learning Cliff - It's Worth It
I have used Drupal in a variety of contexts, including public-facing information and commercial sites, and internal intranets. Drupal provides an excellent platform for content managers to create and edit information on these sites. I have also implemented Drupal solutions for a community word game site, a school fundraising organization, and as a front-end for more complex data collection and analysis applications. It's an incredibly robust and extensible system, so it can be tweaked and modified to fulfill a wide variety of specific needs.
- Excellent content management system, with a lot of room for customizing, especially due to the wealth of contributed modules. Extensibility is also enhanced by a very good API for creating your own modules
- Completely open-source, so you're only paying for the time needed to develop and maintain your site. No ongoing costs for licenses, etc.
- Fantastic open-source community, with experts all over the world sharing their knowledge. If you have a problem, someone out there can help you with it.
- Security. Another advantage of the strong community is ongoing maintenance and improvements of the software, so it's easy to keep your system up-to-date and secure.
- VERY steep learning curve for both developers and designers, half jokingly referred to as a learning cliff. If you're going to build something, you need to do a lot of planning and research to ensure that you're following best practices.
- Difficult to set up a system making it easy for non-technical end users to enter complexly styled content. If the content managers are responsible for layout of individual pieces of content, there is an additional steep learning curve. Alternatively, a reasonable amount of training is required to ensure that content managers know how to use the system.
- Written documentation for many modules, including some of the most commonly used ones, is often piss-poor or completely lacking. Some UI aspects can seem completely arcane as a result, adding to the difficulties of learning how to use the system.
July 17, 2015
How Drupal will make YOU and your users happy.
We use Drupal CMS for almost all our websites including a big portal that consists of 5 different sites from variety of areas. The site is used by our organization and our members (around 5 000 people) across the US. We are covering all aspects of bankruptcy related things and providing accurate information to our clients through journal articles, law reviews, conferences, materials, recordings and etc.
- Drupal is a stable, well built Content Management System that allows users to enjoy the website. It's regularly maintained and updated. That's what makes it a reliable tool for creating websites.
- Drupal works with thousands of themes that could be customized according to your requirements. Also, layout of pages could be changed without any problems.
- Drupal handles users' roles and permission assignment without any problems and allows administrators configure them at any point. Creating, changing and deleting users' accounts is a pleasant and easy to handle process.
- The only thing I would recommend is more control on custom modules. The problem with those is bugs that are not addressed sometimes.
July 17, 2015
Best Content Management solution for enterprises
Drupal is an excellent system for managing complex content. It provides simple ways to store any type of content in an organized manner and has a huge support community. At my organization, we are bringing Drupal to large enterprises and creating flexible systems that cater to their needs. Although our organization provides many technology solutions, our department strictly handles applications developed on top of the Drupal platform.
- Creates a consistent structure of data
- Allows for easy management of storing and displaying content
- Provides expert solution for moderation of content
- High skill level required for initial deployment of an application
- Front end development requires knowledge of PHP and an understanding of Drupal and server-side debugging tools
- Difficult to track competent developers with many Drupal services being offered by novices
July 07, 2015
Drupal, faster and easier than other CMSs.
Our company is web software / advertising agency. Our product and most of client's websites are based on APS.Net and more recently ASP MVC 4 technology; however, some of the clients, mostly government agencies, require open source technology and Drupal is number one choice for these projects. Most of these projects are done in our Washington DC location. I was hired here because of my Drupal experience to work on a website for a big hospital network based in California. Drupal with all available modules was a good choice.
- Large support community. You can ask almost any question and if you don't have it answered already, you will in no time.
- Easy theming. A lot of themes available to use. Easy to install and start working.
- Tons of modules available, which meets 90% of needs for almost any project.
- It would be nice if Drupal would be written or would support MVC code. I recently work a lot with ASP MVC 4 and Razor coding is so much nicer and cleaner than using PHP.
- All modules adds too much code. Each adds own CSS and JS files. And the (PHP/Html) code needs improvements in many cases.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
At the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation, we use Drupal to promote our organization with regular content, sell electronic and physical resources, provide event registration, facilitate course registration for our online online school, and to integrate with Salesforce for customer relationship management. Every department within our organization relies on one or more features of Drupal and that list of features is always growing. Because of the flexibility it offers, we are always able to come up with a clean and efficient solution to our departmental needs.
- Drupal provides flexible content management and a useful backend administrative interface that non technical administrators can easily use.
- Drupal provides a powerful API that is ready to be customized for anything from Salesforce integration to payment gateway integration.
- Drupal is always being developed and tested by thousands of competent and competitive developers so there is almost always a solution ready to use.
- Drupal maintains a high level of security which is important to our organization.
- Drupal provides a means for our organization to meet individual department needs without always having to commit to expensive third party solutions.
- Drupal can be difficult to configure right out of the box and often takes a contracted developer to complete the initial build and configuration.
- Like any open source software, Drupal is always advancing and changing. Regular maintenance is a must to keep your web application secure and efficient.
- Drupal may be overkill for some small projects. While this is a true evaluation, it is easy enough to configure for small uses and then has the flexibility to expand into something more.
July 07, 2015
Make Drupal Your CMS of Choice
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Drupal is being used in a multi-domain environment for a set of community sites where we can display events, sell one of our products via it's own website apart from the main, ask surveys in another site, and display an archive of our catalogs in another site. They are viewable by the public for their benefit in the market that we serve. One main thing we are trying to address is the content management and the many domains, but one code base, and Drupal does both of these quite well.
- Drupal offers multiple sites on one code base out of the box, so to speak. It's an incredible strength should you need Drupal for both a customer-facing site, and an intranet and only want to manage one code base.
- For developers, it offers a bare-bones content management system that you can customize to fit your needs. It is built with a module-based system so that you can plug and play what modules will fit your organizational needs.
- It offers the ability to either use themes built by the community or customize your own.
- One strength I mentioned is the bare-bones that you can build on yourself, but this also leads to a weakness in that you cannot usually just set up a site and expect to have what you need quickly. I can setup a Wordpress site and have one very usable in a week, but I cannot do that with Drupal. As a developer, I don't mind this, but this can easily frustrate non-developers.
July 07, 2015
Drupal Can Be Used By a Non-Developer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Extremely flexible - You can do almost anything with modules.
- We use modules for things like SEO and for customizing the look and feel of the website / creating customized views. We use WordPress for our blog, and the difference here is striking: WordPress has very few of these kinds of third-party tools available.
- I use the Blocks module a lot which enables me to work on boxes of content that can be displayed in regions on a webpage. This capability is important, because it enables me to work on content without having to know any complex coding so that I can work independently with no dependency on our developer. I also use a Dashboard module and another module called NodeQueue that allows me to manage things like press releases, articles in the news, banners, etc.
- Drupal is an open-source platform with a very active community and there are very many resources available online in forums etc. The various forums are very active and are a great resource for getting answers to technical questions.
- Can be more complicated to use than Joomla or other CMS tools so you need a developer or third party on your team.
- The great flexibility offered by modules also has a downside in that it can be difficult to manage all of these components. It would be very difficult to manage a Drupal site without access to an experienced in-house or third-party developer resource . I rely heavily on our developer to help not just with coding, but also best-practice advice, maintenance etc.
- Needs better design interface and usability: The issue here is that the platform does not really have a WYSIWYG text editor. It is necessary to have at least a basic understanding of HTML and CSS style sheets to make the site look the way you want. More could be done here to make the tools easier to use without requiring technical expertise.
December 12, 2014
Drupal is a great CMS for Mid-level Web Designers
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
My company uses Drupal as the main CMS for our website. We originally had a 3rd party build out the template and CSS for our site and now we just maintain the website and continually make updates to the content and graphics. We have 5 users setup but I am the primary user. Drupal makes it quick and easy to make updates to the website without needing to know a lot about coding.
- WYSIWYG - Drupal has a very simple interface when it comes to making changes to existing pages. All the tools you need to build out all the content on a page are right there and there really isn't anything missing from the tool set. If something is missing you can easily switch to the HTML view and manually make your changes and then preview them before saving/publishing the page.
- Modules - I'm not sure if having a lot of modules installed is good or bad for performance reasons, but we have a lot installed because they make life easier when I'm trying to do certain things on our website, like for instance, restricting the search box to only certain types of content or nodes. Little things like this would be really difficult to implement if I were manually coding the website.
- Blocks - Drupal Blocks are great. They are an easy way to add content areas to different locations on your page. We use them for sidebar content, content above or below webforms, and for our footer content. You can make an endless amount of blocks and specify the exact pages they should be visible on or even if they should be on every page. We do a lot of this where we have for example a industry specific case study, I then make the block visible in our sidebar on every page that has something to do with that specific industry.
- Revisions - Every time I update content on a page I checkmark the new revision box. This makes a archive of the page and if I want to roll back a version of the page it's a simple one click. You can have unlimited revisions and go back to any saved revision point.
- Updating - I'm sure everyone's install and theme for their Drupal site is different, but with ours we are stuck at Drupal version 6 (3-4 years outdated now). If we try to upgrade to Drupal version 7 our entire site breaks, like BSOD breaks. I don't really know if we are missing anything from not having version 7 but I always like to have the latest and greatest. So for now we are stuck at version 6 until we decide to completely rebuild our site on version 7+.
- Could be smarter - I wish Drupal would be smarter in the aspect of knowing correct coding languages and styles and If I were to update a page using bad code or something that just doesn't make sense code wise or will break things it should prompt you before saving and state any problem areas. I use SendMyAd for different magazine vendors and it checks the print Ads I upload for problem areas and then notifies me what they are before I submit the Ad. Something like this in Drupal would be awesome!
- Views - Plain and simple Views are confusing. We had them setup by a 3rd party and I can not figure out how to edit them or add others.
- CSS - Our theme was customized by a 3rd party and there are random CSS files everywhere that sometimes need to be updated outside of Drupal which makes things confusing. There might be a solution for this already but we do not have it. I would like one simple module in Drupal for CSS where I can see and edit all code.
December 11, 2014
Drupal for the win
I use Drupal for making websites for my customers. Via this way they're able to manage their website themselves.
- Very flexible and easy way of managing content on a website for a webmaster.
- For PHP developers, there are a lot of modules in the community which solve a general problem or connect to third party systems.
- Good management of users and roles in the backend.
- For developers: it is not written in MVC which should make it even more logical. Version 8 will be in MVC.
December 09, 2014
Deciding Whether to Use Drupal?
A Touch of Technology is a Drupal shop meaning that we develop complicated systems and website for organizations using the Drupal platform. We also use Drupal for our own website and have built several community sites utilizing Drupal Commons. Drupal is an excellent platform in that it is flexible, scalable, and offers an unlimited array of potential for website functionality for both small businesses and large organizations. Drupal based websites can be managed by multiple departments and are an excellent choice when looking to implement marketing automation.
- Drupal is scalable meaning that it offers great benefits for small businesses and large organizations alike. We have built website as small as 5 pages on Drupal and websites that are over 10,000 pages.
- Drupal's administration is user-friendly. This is important since many of the folks that we implement Drupal for are not programmers and yet Drupal gives them the ability to take control of their websites through the development of new content, the addition of features, and the ability to schedule content out.
- The latest calendar module is disappointing. It doesn't support many of the features that the D6 version offered and is now more difficult to implement.
- Changes to user password emails resulted in frustration for our clients. Instead of emailing out passwords it now just says 'your password'. With our clients, if they remembered their password, they wouldn't have requested it.
December 05, 2014
Future of Drupal
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Currently we are using Drupal in the development of the internal application that all Ericsson employees use for accessing company policy and documents. It also has a news and events section where employees can read important information about news or events related to the company. As well we have developed an internal tool for managing employee questions and answers.
- High-Performance, Scalability and Reliability
- Huge OpenSource Community
- A great tool for Developers, Site-Builders and Content Managers
- Use of Object-oriented programming practices (fixed in Drupal 8)
- Improve front-end with clean markup and mobile friendly (fixed in Drupal 8)
- Easy Multilingual support (fixed in Drupal 8)
- Improve UX and content editing (fixed in Drupal 8)
- Easy configuration deploy from development to live (fixed in Drupal 8)
- Migration tool for older Drupal versions and other content management systems (fixed in Drupal 8)
April 02, 2014
Drupal or Drufoe?
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I have used Drupal to build test sites and I used it on a project for a client of mine who had previously had their site built using Drupal. It is a CMS system, so the business problem it addresses is the necessity to have a website built quickly with a lot of control built in by default. The pre-made templates that can be customized and templates that can be created from scratch are a bonus to using this CMS.
- Drupal allows for very detailed user access control. After installing modules, you can give specific access rights to specific user levels.
- When new versions of Drupal come out, your website emails you. The installation only takes a couple clicks and sets up the new version securely. It makes you verify that you want the new version to override the older one, which is a great security feature. You can check to make sure everything is running correctly and verify.
- There is very little that Drupal can do without assistance from a third party module. My experience with the modules has been pretty bad.
- Since Drupal needs modules to run more than basic pages, the use of the module community is often necessary. The modules are free, as is the support, but the support is often very shaky, and not very many solutions are provided when problems arise. This isn't so much the core Drupal's fault, as the modules are an open source effort on the part of the community, HOWEVER, the modules are often necessary to create a function website, so the user friendliness and overall friendliness of the module developers should be taken into consideration.
- I don't particularly like the admin layout. You log into the site from the front end and then your admin menu shows up at the top of your screen. This puts you at a disadvantage when you want to see the front end as a regular user as you are updating from the backend. You either have to log out of being an admin to view the site as a regular user, or you have to have your site up in a different browser to see the site as both the admin and the regular user in two separate browser windows. Not super efficient.
- Drupal is slow loading, which good web developers know is not a good thing.