An all-powerful CMS with a steep learning curve
December 04, 2019
An all-powerful CMS with a steep learning curve
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Drupal
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.
- Positive - I've used Drupal for hundreds of client projects. Drupal is open source, so there is no overhead to using it.
- Positive - Since all my sites are on the same platform, managing client websites is easy. I know how every site is built, and don't have to remember custom things for each one.
- Negative - Some clients are DIYers, so teaching them how to log into Drupal's admin area and create or edit web pages can be challenging. It's not that Drupal itself makes it challenging, though it might be easier for a client to make their own webpage or blog post in a WordPress site. But clients don't compare the Drupal experience to WordPress. They compare it to writing an article in MS Word. Or they get flustered when they copy and paste text into Drupal, and unknowingly copy over all of Word's backend code as well.
- Positive - I've been able to take on some very simple projects, and some extremely complicated projects - and I can use the same Drupal starting point regardless. That saves a tremendous amount of time as each setup can be identical and automated.
I've used WordPress sparingly when helping a client with an existing website. I find it much less powerful and robust, and frankly confusing. The way WordPress websites are set up in the backend doesn't make sense to me after getting used to how Drupal is set up. They're different platforms, and some of the basic features are approached in very different ways. To be fair, I have never really tried to learn WordPress as a platform. I know from anecdotal experience it is perfectly fine for most business websites, but having gotten used to how Drupal sets things up, WordPress always seemed backward to me.