Do you deploy a lot of content daily? Do you have strong technical resources? Drupal 8 might be a fit!
Rating: 8 out of 10
December 26, 2018
KR
Vetted Review
Verified User
2 years of experience
My company was recently hired to build out a fully integrated digital ecosystem for a large endurance brand; inclusive of a CMS, E-commerce Platform, Data warehousing, and a data normalization engine to tie it all together. For this, we selected Drupal 8, Magento, and AWS (Redshift and Lambdas).
Being a global brand, Drupal 8 was the CMS (built by developers for developers) that provided the most extensible launchpad with localization and language support, as well as great workflow and collaboration tools for content creators.
Drupal 8 is utilized by brand ambassadors to submit content for review, internal editors to review content, race directors to manage events and venues, as well as marketers to post landing pages. It ensures consistent branding across the board.
Being a global brand, Drupal 8 was the CMS (built by developers for developers) that provided the most extensible launchpad with localization and language support, as well as great workflow and collaboration tools for content creators.
Drupal 8 is utilized by brand ambassadors to submit content for review, internal editors to review content, race directors to manage events and venues, as well as marketers to post landing pages. It ensures consistent branding across the board.
- 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.
Cons
- This is NOT the most intuitive CMS. You really need to take the time to understand how Drupal 8 works--how content is served up--if you're going to administer a site. Whereas WordPress is very "flat" and simple, Drupal 8 is much more dynamic. You utilize Views to access your content/data and "blocks" to build out beautiful landing pages (similar to widgets in WordPress). I had to prepare a TON of documentation for the client--so many user guides.
- It is not very friendly to engineers. It probably took 3 to 4 times longer to build out a Drupal 8 site as opposed to had we built it as a static site with perhaps a WordPress back-end (though you would have required multiple WordPress instances to manage localization and other things, which is what we were replacing).
- It seems that the Drupal 8 consortium (or whatever) is trying to push the ball forward a little too far, rather than consistently maintaining a solid foundation. There were many times when my engineers had to build entirely custom modules to compensate for known bugs in Drupal 8. I have good engineers and we still lost weeks to deploy a workaround. Your organization might not be so lucky as to have an appropriate caliber of engineers, though I hope it is!