Enterprise CMS Platform with Superpowers: Cunning, Flexibility, and Strength.
February 19, 2016
Enterprise CMS Platform with Superpowers: Cunning, Flexibility, and Strength.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Drupal
Drupal is used both headlessly and natively for the Customer Service and Knowledge base teams, as the customer service article warehouse. It allows for a small development team to maintain 20k+ articles created and managed by multiple teams. Drupal is also used as the hub for internationalization of these articles, sent out to third-party translation services, and stored and retrieved through Drupal's I18N modules. A majority of features used are industry standards, like views, revisioning, and services. Drupal allows for maximum flexibility and extendability, with a massive amount of developmental leverage.
- Extendability. The hook system available keeps the code clean, maintainable between teams and projects, even bringing in contrib modules to use and extend.
- Prototyping. With such a large degree of community modules I'm often able to built up a feature prototype, by myself, in 4-16 hours.
- Community. Drupal has a large community for Q+A, as well as quality modules to extend your site functionality with minimal effort.
- Theming. Drupal as a system is well engineered, however the number and quality of the out-of-the-box themes (In comparison to WordPress) is smaller and lower-quality than I'd like.
- Learning Curve. Drupal education on use is a necessity when training new users, it isn't as intuitive as it could be and can often be a barrier to entry.
- I'm able to accomplish the work of 3-5 developers on other platforms, with a team of 2.
WordPress is like working with an old brick building, aesthetically it's appealing, but restructuring it is difficult, messy, and often takes a considerable amount more effort. It isn't as feature rich, most of the module add-ons are either not well made, or not open-source, so it can be expensive just to try different solutions.
Joomla! has a decent workflow system in place, but the size of the community has dwindled over the years and is shrinking, it doesn't really offer anything better than Drupal.
SquareSpace is the new Website Hipster on the scene, I've used it and liked what I've seen. The issue you face with a WYSIWYG-site builder is at the end of the day you'll reach a bottleneck in terms of development. For a handful of key components it works great and looks great, but version control is in-a-box, and if there's a feature or unique use case you might be painting yourself against a wall.
Joomla! has a decent workflow system in place, but the size of the community has dwindled over the years and is shrinking, it doesn't really offer anything better than Drupal.
SquareSpace is the new Website Hipster on the scene, I've used it and liked what I've seen. The issue you face with a WYSIWYG-site builder is at the end of the day you'll reach a bottleneck in terms of development. For a handful of key components it works great and looks great, but version control is in-a-box, and if there's a feature or unique use case you might be painting yourself against a wall.