Solid and Advanced Content Management with Drupal
Updated December 24, 2015
Solid and Advanced Content Management with Drupal
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
7.x
Modules Used
- Better Exposed Filters, CCK Blocks, CDN, Colorbox, Context, Date, Devel, Draggable Views, Entity API, Features, Field Collections, Generate Password, HTTPBL, i18n, Insert Block, Internal Nodes, Lang Dropdown, Media, Memcache, Menu Block, Metatag, Node Clone, Pathauto, Quicktabs, Real Name, Redirect, Redis, References, Rules, Schema, Secure Permissions, Shield, Similar Terms, SimpleSAMLphp Auth, Special Menu Items, Taxonomy Access Lite, Translation Management, Token, Transliteration, Unique Field, Variable, Views, Views Bulk Operations, Webform, Workbench
Overall Satisfaction with Drupal
We use Drupal to address marketing web presence needs which reaches into various integrations. It's primary value is allowing rapid content creation and management by non-technical staff. Content can immediately be accessed by end-users, chiefly for the purpose of lead generation as well as industry and product knowledge.
- Enabled rapid feature development due to a mature community offering free extension modules. The scope of plugins is well balanced for focused purpose without bloat.
- Carefully configured permission/role structure allows people to manage content and publish live, keeping marketing fast paced.
- A suite of solutions allows deployment of code and configuration safely.
- Advanced staff is able to make changes via UI that might require developers in other systems.
- The platform is written in PHP, which is a ubiquitous/commodity service for web servers administrators and hosting providers.
- Native features like taxonomy vocabularies, content types, field structures, and permissions architecture are very mature.
- Admin user interfaces for installed modules are created by a wide-array of open-source developers. These can therefor be less cohesive than if they were all developed together.
- The Drupal platform allows live editing and configuration, so in order to be performant several layers of caching are required. These exist within Drupal but take time/expertise to setup properly.
- Drupal is free, extensions are free, even community help/bug fixing is free as long as your positive and constructive. The Drupal development/theming community is large so hiring is also not a challenge.
- Content involved employees can enjoy self-driven control, team authoring, and easy content management. Provided your system is configured well.
- Drupal has provided an easy framework for systems integration for numerous services around lead conversation optimization, acquisition, and analysis.
Personal experience with WordPress has been that it offers a small fraction of the tools found with Drupal. Experience with Joomla was that add-ons were too far-reaching; they did not allow combining a few smaller tools to craft your final goals. Personal experience with Django required developer level expertise to make any substantive system change. Experience with Ruby on Rails found more well structured code patterns and deployment methods, but less mature CMS tools and lack of editor UI approach. Personal experience with custom built .Net/PHP/ColdFusion has been messy, non-modular, unmaintainable systems that lack basic norms.
Using Drupal
75 - Marketing lead generators, event organizers, content authors and website developers.
4 - PHP web developers, CSS/JS front-end developers, site builders via CMS UI.
- Marketing content publishing platform
- Lead acquisition through web forms.
- Event and webinar registration, trial downloads.
- Training video platform.
- Single sign on integration.
- Custom webforms.
- Data source for external analysis tools.
- Support, knowledge base system.
- User profile management.
- Sales contact/opportunity management.
Drupal Implementation
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled - We use change management with Drupal all the time. Great tool for such things.