Drupal as a Solution for Clients
December 22, 2018
Drupal as a Solution for Clients
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Drupal
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.
- In a positive sense, I can develop sites using Drupal for non-profit organizations that may not afford me to keep their sites up to date, so they can now do it themselves. This is just as applicable to any type of organization for that matter.
- The negative impact this has had has been that of being called on when the client becomes confused with accessing their account. If I charge for this small favor, I received a negative review, if I do not charge, then I receive calls, seemingly forever.
- All in all, the ROI is positive. Drupal is worth the time and effort to learn and offer.
I selected Drupal because of the simplicity upon going live. "Simple" is not the word I would use prior to the site going live though. I have used Jumla (which I believe was part of Drupal as one CMS about 12 or 15 years ago). Jumla is almost identical in capabilities to Drupal. It is developed differently, but capable of most other things that Drupal can do to my knowledge. I have used an extremely highly priced product (approx 500,000.00) of which I will not mention the name - as it was absolutely terrible in functionality and had limitations for editors. Lastly, I have frequently used WordPress as my CMS. WP has more theme options and the community of users is larger than the size of Drupal users. WordPress can be simple or complex depending on the theme, plugins, etc. These are some of the many comparisons.