Make Drupal Your CMS of Choice
Updated July 07, 2015

Make Drupal Your CMS of Choice

Chris Coppenbarger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

7

Modules Used

  • CTools
  • Views
  • Internationalization
  • Display Suite
  • Webform
  • Commerce

Overall Satisfaction with Drupal

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.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.
  • It has led to increased content management efficiency in that we are able to better manage what content can be put out there. Once it is developed, the developers can move on to other projects, and it is up to the content managers to ensure the content is fresh.
  • Customers can better interact with the site as there is less opportunity for bugs to creep into the code.
Wordpress is very simple and easy to set up, but is not that easy to customize. Drupal is all about customization. Joomla is also very customizable, but has grown too big and bulky. Drupal allows for more customization then either of these other two products.
Drupal is very appropriate for sites with a lot of content, and custom theming. If you are only developing a blog or only a few static pages, but need a content management system, I would recommend Wordpress, as it is better-suited for those scenarios. If you expect to have more custom work on your site, then Drupal is very much the way to go.

Drupal Feature Ratings

8.1
WYSIWYG editor
8
Code quality / cleanliness
9
Admin section
10
Page templates
8
Library of website themes
8
Mobile optimization / responsive design
6
Publishing workflow
8
Form generator
8
8.8
Content taxonomy
10
SEO support
7
Bulk management
7
Availability / breadth of extensions
10
Community / comment management
10
8.0
API
8
Internationalization / multi-language
8
8.0
Role-based user permissions
8
CMS programming language or framework ()
Not Rated

Using Drupal

Drupal continues to innovate on the content management front in that they are pursuing default mobile theming in the next iteration as well as continuing the complete customization. There are some things that they are adding to the default code base which I may not like or agree with, but overall, it continues to be a steady product with a steady stream of users and developers.

Drupal Implementation

Drupal Training

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