Drupal - flexible CMS with a huge community behind it
December 12, 2017
Drupal - flexible CMS with a huge community behind it
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Drupal
We used Drupal to create our own custom learning management system for the company, which helped us digitally distribute our software packages and limit the amount of time users had access to them, thus making them subscription products, which was something we were never able to do before. Customers loved the move because it did away with having to use a DVD disc in their computer and remember to bring it with them when they needed their kids to do their homework. We also made a secure online space for kids under the age of 13 to interact with their teachers on homework and class discussions, thus adding another digital layer of interface between teachers and kids for better communication.
- User management was great in Drupal, we were able to create custom roles for users and assign them special permissions based on their roles.
- Customization of Drupal was a real strength, we were able to customer our site to look exactly the way we wanted and mocked up in our early brainstorming sessions. There is a vast array of add-ons available to Drupal for themes and customization that anyone can take advantage of.
- Add-on modules were the real strength of drupal, because anyone in the world could develop and offer new add-on functionality for drupal and those developers could share it with the whole drupal community and help each other advance the add-on module together.
- The community is really the best part of Drupal, there is a huge pool of developers all contributing and helping each other to advance Drupal with new features and better security all the time.
- The one thing that Drupal could improve on are the upgrade paths for updating the system between each major release of the software, when drupal moved from version 7 to version 8, most people could not do the upgrade for many months, while they waited on the add-on modules they used to be updated to work with version 8 as well. I think involving the module developers earlier on, on new major update releases could help fix this.
- Add-on modules can sometimes be slow to update or fix problems because some developers aren't that active in updating their add-on modules
- Some module developers build modules that only serve their own immediate need and are not willing to update or advance their modules to expand its functionality to serve others similar needs. Other developers are usually offered to take over and customize the project for their own needs but sometimes the documentation for existing modules can be lacking, depending on the developer.
- Drupal allowed my company to finally realize their goal of offering a subscription based software package that expired and revoked the users permissions after a certain amount of time. Previously we had to offer perpetual licenses to our software and users would pass down their licenses to others, thus limiting our revenue on those products.
- Drupal allowed my company to easily keep our own website up to date with the latest and greatest things we offered without needing to pay a web developer every time we wanted to add something to our website.
- Drupal allowed our company to finally offer an e-commerce site that integrated with our in-house ERP system named Acumen because of the flexibility and customization available within Drupal and its modules.
We decided to go with Drupal because of the immense community and library of add on modules available within drupal as well as the availability to customize it and finally the vast availability of developers also helped sway our choice to go with Drupal. Drupal had the best of all worlds for us in those areas.