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A Powerful Content and Web Service Platform
Updated November 11, 2015

A Powerful Content and Web Service Platform

Peter Wolanin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

7.x

Modules Used

  • core
  • Views
  • Apache Solr Search

Overall Satisfaction with Drupal

We use Drupal internally for our public-facing websites, as well as using it to build back-end management tools.

In addition, we provide Drupal support and services for thousands of companies and individuals.
  • Drupal's power comes from the ability to re-use content and parts of content in many different pages and contexts of the website.
  • Drupal is also a powerful platform to integrate with other web services - I have a lot of experience integrating with Apache Solr, I've also help integrate it with CRM systems, event management systems, ecommerce services, and many more
  • Starting from a bare Drupal site requires a lot of configuration, but there are also a growing number of pre-configured distributions that make it easy to start from a nearly complete solution for a specific use case.
  • Because of its tremendous flexibility it's sometime difficult for new (or even experienced) user to be sure they are making the optimal choices of modules and configuration.
  • Since Drupal is not code-compatible between major versions, community-provided modules are not always upgraded and that can make site upgrades challenging if you use one of those modules.
  • Drupal allows us to build very rapid prototypes and then refine them.
  • The fact that Drupal is free (GPL) software with a tremendous impact by fostering a strong community. Even companies that compete on some fronts collaborate to make the code better for everyone.
Drupal 7 can be very powerful as a web service endpoint, but can be nearly as slow as loading a full page to get a response. This should be improved in Drupal 8.x, but caution should be used if you are considering using Drupal 7.x with something like a JS front-end that needs very fast data updates from a web service.

Using Drupal

My experience with Drupal allows me to be very productive, and I have a personal investment due to contributing code and modules.

Drupal Reliability


Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required.
For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).