Item: Drupal
Rating: 7
Author: Jeff Montgomery

Overall Satisfaction with Drupal

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Over the years, we've tried out a lot of different CMS systems to create marketing and e-commerce websites for various divisions of the company. Drupal has been around for a long time, and we've given their CMS a ride in hopes of creating a website to showcase some of our company's products and information to visitors from targeted pet groups in our industry.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It has excellent security features and consistent updates.
It allows for extensive customization with the integrated themes and core code, especially when you first install it. This allows our dev team to get creative with marketing initiatives.
There is a large online community of Drupal users that consistently help answer any questions and issues

Cons

This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like WordPress or Shopify.
Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.

Return on Investment

Drupal helped us launch a creative, marketing- and product-focused website with custom coding integrations tailored to our goals.
Drupal allows us to rely on secure and consistently updated core code.
Drupal's code taxing on the server does start to get a bit heavy as you go along with customizations, so at some point, we decided to stop. We want to ensure our Google Page Score remains high, including paying close attention to page load speed.

Usability

I would recommend seasoned developers use this platform if they are looking to enjoy the freedom of creative code flexibility on a secure core code platform. That being said, Drupal is not really meant for those who just work off of front-end situations (ie, drag and drop, and WYSIWYG designers and such).

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace

Drupal excels at allowing seasoned programmers to really get creative with marketing initiatives in terms of working with a theme and the core code. That being said, it is definitely much more challenging for average developers and front-end builders to use, especially at scale. So, depending on the strength of your development team's knowledge, I would suggest choosing accordingly among the other CMS systems available on the market.

Key Insights

Do you think Drupal delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Drupal's feature set?

Yes

Did Drupal live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Drupal go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Drupal again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Drupal is well-suited for development teams seeking flexibility to scale on a dependable and secure coding platform. However, I would not recommend it to average developers or those looking for a more plug-and-play style CMS to get up and running quickly. It's also not the best solution for very large (database-heavy) websites, as the system can bog down server resources with its code.

Drupal Feature Ratings

Comments

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Drupal Is A Solid Choice For Seasoned Programmers.