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Don't Drop Drupal Just Yet
Updated March 08, 2016

Don't Drop Drupal Just Yet

Jonah McLachlan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Drupal

I was a Web Analyst at the University of Edinburgh. The Web Interfaces team develop bespoke web solutions for individuals and departments for the University of Edinburgh, and servicing external clients. This development team had a portfolio of over 30 website projects. My main tasks were to patch, backup, and deploy drupal instances. I also was involved in some back end development and configuration.

From my experience:


Drupal will create a secure and scalable website without prioritising aesthetics. Ease of Use and design is often sacrificed for speed, security and performance.

  • Drupal's has built-in tools for automating SEO
  • Large organisations and governments (White House) will use it for their content - it is trusted and secure.
  • Correct Drupal development allows for custom content and extra features without too many complications
  • Drupal makes performance a priority by having built-in caching.
  • Users often find design to be problematic.
  • Drupal’s themes sometimes do not offer mobile compatibility.
  • Drupal has a steep learning curve. It developed for developers and therefore not user-friendly for the end-user or customer without training.
  • Customers were satisfied with powerful systems which were stable.
  • Drupal team usage increased as we provided training sessions
Drupal is a powerful choice for a CMS. Although having complex admin menu and setup process, it has quality security, SEO and speed built in as default. Drupal has caching built into the system, making it double the speed of other compared CMS’s like WordPress. Drupal is extremely customisable with custom content types, making it one the most flexible CMS systems available. Downloading a distribution is free, however maintenance and development can prove very costly, companies also should factor-in training costs to use this system.
Drupal is very powerful. Therefore for a database driven system (requiring content management) this platform is very useful.

Therefore if a popular garden area wanted to have a website, listing all their plants, then Drupal would be suitable.

However for a simple blog or 5-page website, Drupal is overkill. And users will find it difficult taming this beast to perform simple duties

Drupal Feature Ratings

4.6
WYSIWYG editor
4
Code quality / cleanliness
6
Admin section
9
Page templates
3
Library of website themes
4
Mobile optimization / responsive design
2
Publishing workflow
2
Form generator
7
7.2
Content taxonomy
8
SEO support
8
Bulk management
7
Availability / breadth of extensions
7
Community / comment management
6
5.5
API
6
Internationalization / multi-language
5
8.0
Role-based user permissions
8
CMS programming language or framework ()
Not Rated

Using Drupal

Information Services
Education Services
Technical Support
Content Management
Library Services

Evaluating Drupal and Competitors

Using Drupal

Usability is a subjective thing. However when using this platform,
  • I found that Drupal creates many clicks for the user
  • Theme/Module Customisation difficult without technical skills.
  • Complicated taxonomies and content types, which is daunting without prior training.
  • Mobile Responsiveness is a joke, and is recently starting to appear on themes.
  • Drupal sacrifices good design for functionality.
ProsCons
Like to use
Well integrated
Unnecessarily complex
Requires technical support
Inconsistent
Cumbersome
Feel nervous using
Lots to learn
  • Creating Taxonomies and Content types are a dream
  • Updates are great, small clicks can update the site.
  • Installing a module from the community is simple
  • Trying to install complex modules which require command line tools.
  • Patching or doing major updates
  • Creating layouts can be complicated, views etc