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Drupal User, but not Drupal Lover
July 25, 2016

Drupal User, but not Drupal Lover

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Drupal

We utilize Drupal as the backend CMS for a website. It was implemented by the website design firm and handed over to us once the design process was completed, so we manage it ourselves now. It was basically implemented as a way to update the site without directly editing the HTML and to provide some additional functionality, such as user account management (website logins) and some basic scheduling.
  • Drupal has a wide range of plugins, allowing for a huge amount of customization within the platform.
  • Being that there is a free version, it's very affordable.
  • The platform is not easy to upgrade in order to keep up with security updates.
  • The large number of plugins makes the product a bit complex to deal with without some kind of outside consulting or significant programming experience.
  • We've had to contract outside consultants to implement some recent security updates due to the complexity of the Drupal code-base. Most other changes we handled in-house.
We went with Drupal due to prior experience with Drupal as a CMS, however, the previous site was not as complex.
Drupal is well-suited to organizations that need complex CMS functionality and website features, but are contracting with an outside web design firm to maintain the installation once it goes into production.

Drupal Feature Ratings

6.8
WYSIWYG editor
10
Code quality / cleanliness
4
Admin section
5
Page templates
5
Library of website themes
9
Mobile optimization / responsive design
7
Publishing workflow
7
Form generator
7
6.2
Content taxonomy
4
SEO support
4
Bulk management
5
Availability / breadth of extensions
9
Community / comment management
9
Not Rated
API
Not Rated
Internationalization / multi-language
Not Rated
9.0
Role-based user permissions
9
CMS programming language or framework ()
Not Rated

Evaluating Drupal and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
The main reasons for selecting Drupal were the price and our web designers' familiarity with the platform. We'd also used it with another previous website and had some familiarity ourselves, though the complexity of that site was much less than current.
We'd probably still go with Drupal, but we would push more of the management off onto the webdesigner - at least in terms of long-term maintenance.

Using Drupal

It's a great CMS platform and there are a ton of plugins to add some serious functionality, but the security updates are too complex to implement and considering the complexity of the platform, security updates are a must. I don't want my site breached because they make it too difficult to keep it up to date.
ProsCons
Easy to use
Do not like to use
Unnecessarily complex
Requires technical support
Inconsistent
Slow to learn
Feel nervous using
Lots to learn
  • Basic page updates are very easy.
  • Adding in plugins is very easy and many can be selected and enabled with just a few clicks from the admin console.
  • Software/security updates are complex and can be difficult to perform for regular users.
  • Wrapping a site template around the CMS can be difficult, we ended up contracting this out to a third party.
Yes, but I don't use it