Updated November 11, 2015

User Review: "Drupalize it!"

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Libraries Company, 201-500 employees

Score 10 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Software Version
7.26

Modules Used
Views, Merci, Signup, Date, Calendar, Content Access, Conditional Fields, Devel, Image, ThemeKey, Libraries, SOPAC, CKEditor, Webform

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize Drupal across the entire library. It is being used to search our catalog, place holds, manage checkouts and renewals, create events, allow customers to sign up for events, staff training, federated searching, program calendars, and more. Aside from our catalog software, we primarily utilize Drupal for everything else within the library. It has truly allowed us to create a single location to access data from all of our sources.

Pros and Cons

Drupal is excellent for providing a single sign-on location for our users to access our catalog, utilize online databases, and register for events. In the past, they would have had 3 or more accounts to accomplish this and now it is all built right into the Drupal experience.
We have revolutionized our library catalog from something that looked like it was built in 1990 to a very polished product that promotes user interaction and enhances usability.
Our room booking and event management system is now fully integrated into Drupal which gives us much more granular use and control over how we utilize our resources. Customers can book a room for private study time, or register for a class on Excel 101. All of this is topped off with an excellent conflict management system that ensures our rooms are never double booked.

Drupal is definitely missing some documentation for a lot of key modules. It would be great to enforce a minimum text introduction or preferably a short 5-min video clip to go over the ins and outs of each module.
Compared to other CMS products, Drupal can be slow, if not given an adequate amount of server resources.
It is sometimes difficult to stay up to date with the current version of Drupal when support for some key modules is lost after the last major release.

Return on Investment

We have been able to move away from a 3rd party room reservation system that had page load times of 2+ minutes. Our system in Drupal is typically under 3-4 seconds for creating reservations and has greatly enhanced our ability to quickly service our customers in person and via the call center.
Our library catalog now offers our customers a predictive search engine, like Google, that was never an option with our old catalog. This has greatly enhanced the efficiency of catalog searches and allows customers to quickly identify whether or not we carry a particular title or author.
We are able to involve all of our staff in the creation of content that is specific to their individual departments. The granular control that Drupal provides makes content management a breeze. With 50+ contributors that are all "locked down" to their specific areas of the site, we never have to worry about having fresh content or continually updating pages within the IT Department. This has allowed the development team to focus efforts on site enhancements rather than making basic content edits.

Alternatives Considered

We opted against Wordpress and Joomla simply because of scalability issues. Each of those platforms are great for performing specific tasks, like creating basic pages, blogs, etc. However, when it comes to building an infrastructure that is going to support 50,000+ users with granular access permissions and an abundance of features, Drupal was really the only option. With the huge user community and open platform that promotes expansion the decision to utilize Drupal was very easy to make.

Likelihood to Recommend

Drupal is great for sites that have a need for scalability. Drupal is a very open platform that allows for anything to be built atop a very solid core system. The most important factor however is to make sure that you have a knowledgeable developer on staff or within arm's reach to be able to tweak and enhance the system.

Web Content Creation

WYSIWYG editor

Code quality / cleanliness

Admin section

Page templates

Library of website themes

Mobile optimization / responsive design

Publishing workflow

Form generator

Web Content Management

Content taxonomy

SEO support

Bulk management

Availability / breadth of extensions

Community / comment management

Platform & Infrastructure

API

Internationalization / multi-language

Security

Role-based user permissions

CMS programming language or framework ()

Likelihood to Renew

We are going to continue to utilize Drupal for years to come. Drupal is continually being made to be more user friendly and continues to lead the open source community with support and an ever-growing user base. It seems that every time a major release is finalized the community has already started to work on the next. To me, this shows the commitment to creating the best platform on the market and not being satisfied with mediocrity.