Drupal works at scale, and is free.
December 21, 2018

Drupal works at scale, and is free.

Matthew Deakyne | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Drupal

Drupal is being used across the whole KU organization. It's the primary content management system, and pages are created for departments, units, and organizations on campus. It provides a supported solution for users to manage their own content, for web developers to help optimize and for marketing to track usage. Content is also exported in blocks to feed other systems with information, including important academic dates.
  • Managing content blocks. Drupal is very effective at providing a standard way to move content across systems.
  • User management of content. Users have complete control over their spaces. It requires some training, but users can update content and create alerts without the need for a web developer.
  • Overall design. Drupal looks pretty good, and provides a good structure for simple text, graphics, and links.
  • Drupal is not intended for visualizations or other interactive content - this is an emerging field that could be better.
  • While mobile responsive, I wouldn't call Drupal the most modern design. It's functional, but not beautiful.
  • Users have control over their content, but it can be difficult to figure out how to do what you are trying to do.
  • I've managed content in Drupal, and this content is viewed by thousands of instructors, preventing the need for them to contact our helpline for assistance. This frees up time for my staff to deal with actual issues, rather than training issues, and is a major positive ROI use case for using Drupal.
  • We provide alerts regarding service outages, hopefully preventing users from calling into our helpline - and allowing the real issues to have a higher volume than issues we are aware of.
I've used Squarespace and WordPress for other businesses, and Drupal was honestly selected due to cost. It does a good job of scaling across our organization - and many units have benefited from having a space to provide content. Squarespace is more modern, and WordPress may be easier to use - but Drupal works.
Drupal is very good for basic content that can be managed by the end user. It's less suited for interactive content and does require training for end users to be effective. There are other products that are more beautiful, or easier to use - but it scales well for an organization of our size (~10,000 employees, many more students).

Drupal Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
9
Code quality / cleanliness
8
Admin section
7
Page templates
8
Library of website themes
Not Rated
Mobile optimization / responsive design
9
Publishing workflow
8
Form generator
6
Content taxonomy
4
SEO support
8
Bulk management
8
Availability / breadth of extensions
Not Rated
Community / comment management
Not Rated
API
6
Internationalization / multi-language
Not Rated
Not Rated
Role-based user permissions
Not Rated