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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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- Magnolia (V5 and later versions)
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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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(1-25 of 32)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
May 28, 2021
Drupal is a great open source CMS
It is a very powerful tool for the general construction of websites.
Drupal is used by my department as a content management tool to bring information and communication to our users on a variety of digital channels. All of this is managed using the open source Drupal framework for which we have a license. Another very interesting point is the possibility of applying different themes for each site. It allows good user management and is also easy to use.
- Open source framework
- Variety of themes, colors and possibilities of work with images and texts
- Easy to use
- 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.
- Steep learning curve, but worth it
May 25, 2021
Capable Contextual CMS
The Historical Society considered using Drupal vs Sitefinity and settled on Drupal due to its open-source structure and versatility. Drupal is a strong tool to use for large organizations where having the ability to do almost anything is key. The software is more like a framework than a CMS in that you can transform it into almost anything you want like building blocks. One thing to keep in mind is it has a steep learning curve for new users and it is very unopinionated in style and setup.
- Relational context makes for very powerful page capabilities
- Can be transformed into anything you can imagine
- Fast search capabilities
- Steep learning curve
- Not ready for use out of the box
- Can be slow to load if not configured properly
January 21, 2020
Need a Content Collaboration Website at Low Cost. Try Drupal!
Open source CMS use by our content team for collaboration and to share files. As the content team is scattered across three different geographies, Drupal allows us to communicate and collaborate quickly and easily through an intranet site. We find it ideal to edit collateral among several collaborators. The allocation of roles to each user allows a quick review cycle while lessening the chance of errors.
- Easy to use, especially compared to other open source CMS.
- Robust user community to address issues and to provide advice.
- Steep learning curve (but easy to use once you learn the system).
- Poorly written or unsupported plug-ins can be a security liability.
January 13, 2020
Drupal is Powerful at Scale
As a search engine marketing agency, some of our customers' websites are powered by Drupal. We configure modules to ensure their websites meet search engine marketing best practices. Overall, we find Drupal to be a powerful content management [tool]. The initial learning curve can be steep, but once you understand how Drupal is organized, it's a solid CMS.
- Powerful
- Easy to scale
- Can be overwhelming to get started
- No two Drupal websites are built quite the same
December 04, 2019
An all-powerful CMS with a steep learning curve
I use Drupal as the primary platform for website design and development for my own company's websites, and all my clients as well. While some smaller client websites may be fine using something less complicated like WordPress, Drupal gives me several unique advantages:
- All my websites use it, so every website I create an manage is on one platform.
- Drupal is infinitely scalable, so as my clients' needs change, it's relatively easy to alter the current website rather than start from scratch.
- Drupal has a feature called "Views", which enables me to create custom content display modes for each client, without reinventing the wheel every time.
- Customizable.
- Scaleable.
- Robust community for support.
- Search engine friendly.
- Extremely powerful, but easily scaled down for simple sites.
- Steep learning curve, but worth it.
- Modules with similar jobs can be confusing - This can be a pro or a con, depending on the day. Sometimes it's nice to have choices, but other times there can be 3 or 4 modules that all do 90% of what you need, but none that do it all. Drupal requires creative thinking to get various modules to work together to complete a task.
- Some modules get abandoned or don't work the way you intended.
July 19, 2019
Drupal, the CMS for large, data-rich websites
Drupal has been selected as the CMS for our new city website. It was time to replace the custom, home-grown CMS we've been using for almost 20 years, and we wanted something that could power a large, enterprise-wide website. We wanted something with a large user base and healthy ecosystem so that we could ensure that the software will be supported and maintained for years to come. Drupal fit the bill as one of the most popular open-source content management systems that is used by over a million websites, many of them government websites like ours.
- Drupal has a large support community. Many businesses and organizations have adopted it, and it has a large developer base, so it's likely to be around for a long time.
- Drupal is designed around the concept of structured data so that the data you put into it is reusable and can easily be referenced or accessed by other pages, or exposed through APIs to other systems.
- Drupal is well suited for building large, complex websites.
- Drupal has a steep learning curve due to its flexibility and complexity. Because it's so flexible and customizable, sometimes it's daunting trying to figure out the best way to do something.
- Some aspects of the system don't receive the support and attention they need, particularly contributed modules. It can take months (or years) for bugs to get resolved, or for new features to be developed. Many of the contributed modules are poorly supported. It's common to find modules that still haven't been migrated to the latest version of Drupal, even though it's been out for over 2 years. It's also common to discover a bug, only to find out that a patch was already submitted to fix that bug months ago, but hasn't been merged into the module yet.
- Upgrading to new versions of Drupal core can sometimes be painful and challenging, depending on how you've customized it or what modules you've enabled.
- Sometimes it's difficult to figure out how to customize a particular aspect of the system because you have to work within the framework it provides.
March 29, 2019
Customizable, scalable and professional content manager.
Drupal is an excellent content manager since it handles large volumes of users and content. We use it in our web system and in the internal intranet. It allows us to create profiles of the users with details and excellent personalization. Besides the personalization, Drupal gives us the facility to add what we need through modules.
- Is easy to install and has a very professional and clean interface.
- Has a lot of free and paid add-ons for anything you can think of. You can also design your own because there is enough documentation for that.
- Drupal is excellent for websites with a lot of content, also where you require high personalization of the permissions and details of the users.
- Has excellent options to implement your websites in different languages.
- As the new versions evolve, they become incompatible with older complements.
- For those who start, the learning curve is steep.
January 01, 2019
Drupal: Excellent CMS for Corporate use
Drupal is the primary platform that all of our customer's company websites are built on. We build landing pages, customer portals, and our brochure style pages on Drupal.
- Responsive web design
- Fast loading page speeds
- SEO
- Slow learning curve
- Could improve CMS experience
December 22, 2018
Drupal as a Solution for Clients
I am, in addition to my organization title, a web developer. After many years of coding, I decided to look into CMSs as this allowed clients to access their sites and update content as needed. Some clients find that the use of Drupal is the solution to simplifying the updating process. Drupal is one CMS that allows the administrator to assign pages or content areas to specific personnel. This again is the solution to the problem of multiple people updating. Depending on the need, Drupal offers flexibility. As a full organization, departments can be given administrative or editor access and avoid even seeing other departments' pages. In my opinion, this is the best solution, especially for the price.
- Very flexible CMS (Content Management System)
- Coding is not required; however, could be useful
- Offers various levels of control
- Themes for layout and color schemes are available at reasonable prices
- Drupal does have a learning curve that requires time, especially if new to CMSs. Therefore, before starting one should be prepared by making a site on their own time prior to offering Drupal as a service.
- Documentation is lengthy but thorough. Some of this gets complicated and the community of users is not as large as some others, such as WordPress or HTML, JS, JQuery, CSS etc.
- The languages used to develop Drupal are a variety and they are multiple. Therefore, if the developer would like to use it and tweak the code, they must know a number of web programming languages.
December 21, 2018
Possibly the most powerful and flexible CMS
We are a marketing and web development company and creating Drupal sites is one of our specialties. We use it internally for several things, but also for most of our clients' projects when their needs fit the solution. It allows us to build sites ranging from small blogs or brochure sites all the way up to huge, scalable, custom e-commerce sites utilizing the same set of tools built by one of the best communities online.
- Drupal is great at managing any amount of content, and any type of content. Its flexibility and customizability are two of its greatest strengths.
- Drupal isn't just a CMS, Drupal lets you build the CMS that website editors will be using. Its backend customization and admin features are awesome and are being expanded by the community all the time.
- There are thousands of contributed modules and themes freely available. Not only is Drupal open source, but all the best modules and themes people have built are available for free as well!
- Drupal's community is big, prolific, and welcoming. Not only can you use other's community contributions, but the community is always happy to help others building their own Drupal sites or custom modules and themes for the rest of the community. If you ever get stuck, the forums or Drupal Slack are incredible resources for assistance.
- Drupal's admin side is very powerful and flexible, but it's a little bit harder to wrap one's mind around. If a customer is familiar with using a basic WordPress site, showing them the full Drupal back-end might be overwhelming and confusing at first. Luckily you can easily limit and customize the admin pages that each role sees.
- Drupal is huge and complex. Doing simple things is generally simple, but more advanced capabilities of Drupal have a higher learning curve (as can be expected). You can build a Drupal site quickly, but don't expect to build your dream site with loads of custom features in a week.
- Ready-made themes are more sparse than something like WordPress. If you're most interested in simply plugging an existing theme in and using it, you won't find as many professional-looking themes out of the box. There are some, but with Drupal, the best results are usually achieved by finding a good base theme and creating your own child theme based off of it.
December 17, 2018
Drupal Can Be Great If You Know How To Use It
Drupal has powered our company website for multiple iterations over the passed 10 years. We have also used it in client projects during that time. What we have liked about it is the granular control it allows over your website out of the box.
- Easily create custom content types which can be used and reused in multiple views around a website.
- Granular control of websites on a per page basis.
- Allows tiered user access to support users having different access to content and administration capabilities.
- Steep learning curve
- Resource intensive
- Making a development mistake can result in hours of debugging trying to figure out what went wrong.
December 11, 2018
Drupal is a powerful but complicated CMS
I used Drupal in a previous organization to build websites for clients. Drupal was our primary CMS, and we used it to build about 12 websites per year. I currently use Drupal to build a few of my personal websites, as well as websites for friends. I also use Drupal to build and maintain a website for an organization that I am a part of.
- Very powerful out of the box
- Highly customizable
- Secure
- Good community
- Steep learning curve
- Resource intensive
- Custom coding and templates can be difficult
- Painfully slow for features and fixes to be added to Drupal core
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.