Drupal Reviews

The ability to create a complex website with a few developments is the most valuable feature, that's what got me started. Of course, a lot of other things are valuable such as the use of Symfony as a framework, the user management system, Internationalization, community and so on.

Creating websites with Drupal allows us to meet our customer needs. It provides a tailored website by using the same CMS and framework. In the end, our goal is to give autonomy for the contributors and to make them feel it's easy to manage their website.

The UI can, probably, be improved as well as the documentation.

For the UI, as WordPress is the biggest challenger of Drupal, we can observe some sort of lacking in that domain, even though it has been largely improved over time. Although, what we have tried to do, is always to create the best UI for contribution and most of the times, the way that the fields are displayed have so much logic behind them, that there is no need for any training. That's one of our primary goals and what satisfies me in the end, is when we deliver to the client.

As it's an open-source project, sometimes it's hard to find any documentation; although it has been improved over time as well. For instance, Symfony on which Drupal 8 is based, has very good documentation. Sometimes, you just have to read the code to understand how it works or how to use an API, which is not the best way to learn for everyone.

I have been using this solution for seven years and am still counting.

We did sometimes encounter stability issues with a few modules, but hardly ever with the core of Drupal itself.

I never thought that there was anything that we couldn't do with Drupal.

Since it's an open-source solution, I'd say that you have to get involved and be able to ask the right person.

I tried WordPress but it seems too limited for me.

The learning curve is rather complex but once you reach a certain level, then there is no limit.

Just invest in a good server, you can use Drupal for free :-)

At the time I started using Drupal, I looked into Joomla, eZ Publish and WordPress.

Due to the community and orientation of Drupal (thanks to Dries Buytaert who is the creator of Drupal), it was a more reasonable choice to make.

Find the right project and just start using it. There is no other way than just jumping into Drupal to know how powerful it is and to learn how to use it. If you have any question, look into drupal.stackexchange.com. If you don't find the answer, just ask.

Frankly, besides WordPress, no other CMS can compete with Drupal.

The hook system. This makes Drupal highly extensible and allows even custom modules to be easily extensible themselves.

Drupal is not an organization management system. It does not help an organization that way. Though, if I were to add a relation to that, I can say that Drupal comes with a huge community that offers their knowledge openly. Now, their professional way of thinking can help in terms of a managing the development lifecycle.

I am not able to answer this question in a few or a lot of words.

Drupal is a system compromised of a lot of modules.There is always room for improvement. The thing is though, that especially since Drupal 8, this is the only thing that it will be doing.

While Drupal had differences between major versions and modules had to be ported in order to function etc, since Drupal 8, there will only be normal upgrades by deprecating methods while introducing new features.

Drupal is now on a constant release flow that will target to only improve.
The community itself has improved quite a lot as well in terms of numbers and quality of code.

I am not saying that Drupal is perfect, it is far from perfect, but the community as an open source organization is improving constantly. Even the front end development of Drupal which was always a weak point, has improved greatly in Drupal 8 using the twig system to easily create templates.

I have been using this solution for 1.5 years since its official release, and 4 years in Drupal 7 before that.

Drupal 8 is only 1.5 years old. It has stability issues, but not major ones. Also, it is very important to note that the support from the community on fixing bugs is really good.

Being one of the strong points of Drupal, I would not say I had issues with scalability! The learning curve might be a bit longer in the new version, since it has converted to OOP, but still keeps some of the old features. Scalability is certainly not affected by it.

Drupal is open source software. It is supported by the huge community and the Drupal association. Out of my personal experience on their website (drupal.org), both the community and the association are extremely willing to provide help and improve the main product and their modules in total.

I have used multiple PHP Frameworks and CMSs like CakePHP, Laravel, Joomla, Wordpress, Magento etc. Just like the difference between frameworks and CMSs, the differences among the products is mainly the purpose.

Drupal is not really better or worse than the rest. It is all about the context. The question is 'What do you want the product for?'.

Drupal is development oriented. It is a bit heavier to build and maintain than, let's say, Wordpress, but only in the context of websites with little to none specialized functionality.

So, the reason for me choosing Drupal over the rest is mainly the context. The projects that I took up needed specialized functionalities while having all functionalities offered by a CMS so, frameworks were out, CMSs were filtered out due to their, as you mention above, scalability, extensibility, orientation towards development. I might still choose e.g. WordPress for a blog-like site etc., but you get the point.

Drupal is a CMS and can easily be installed. The setup is as easy as any other CMS. What is different in Drupal, is that the community is very active in the packages to install. Some main features regarding the
installation are:

• It is composer compatible. A user can use composer to quickly build and install Drupal.
• It has its own cli tool called Drush. It can also be used to quickly build and install Drupal. Drush can also use site.make
  files in order to manage the installation of the Drupal CMS. Drush can even update the core code in a single command.
• It has its own UI for installing and updating modules. Even for sitebuilders, Drupal is easy to extend through its module
  management UI.
• It has a website with thousands of pages of documentation. It is really easy to find support.
• And if all the rest are not enough, it comes with an easy UI wizard that allows to install through the interface.

Drupal is open source software. That is one of the major advantages. Pricing only comes for development and support.

Do not be afraid. The community is eager to meet you :).

Being a community based product, the relationship with the product itself is providing back to the community. Bugs are fixed and contributed upstream to the community when possible.

• I appreciate the free software.
• This gives us the possibility to search deep in the core of the system in case of bugs.
• In addition, it enables you to improve the core functionality. This feature also helped the framework to be more secure because the Drupal community around the world is always checking, verifying, and fixing bugs in the Drupal core and in the contributed modules and themes.
• I am also grateful to the extensible framework. In some cases, just the Drupal and the contributed modules are not enough to build the client requirements.
• Drupal has provided us with a modular framework that we can enhance, where we can develop our own modules to give a required feature to the client.
• We can also contribute back with our module to the wider Drupal community.
• We also really value API documentation because if we need to develop some custom functionality or simply understand what Drupal is doing, we can go to the Drupal API documentation page,
  (https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal), or do a simple search in Google.
• The Drupal community is one of the biggest free software communities around the world. It is so valuable because it is responsible for organizing events around the world, training new developers, providing maintenance to the core, and contributed modules. We have a popular saying in the Drupal community, ”Come for the software, stay for the community”.

We use Drupal to develop most of our clients' sites because the CMS features and the development framework give us the possibility to expend less time in the repetitive functionality, such as the user login or in the content management administration/creation.

We now have more time to focus on crucial features that our client needs, like custom mail notifications, statistics, or other features that can give our clients business value.

I think Drupal has to improve the UX for some administrative pages, such as the modules list page.

When I talk about improvements in user experience of the administration page, specifically in the modules list page, I mean that this page is annoying. It is annoying because the default interface gives us a list of all the modules in the site, uncategorized, and without the possibility to filter by text and to complete the activation of one specific module. Instead, we have to scroll down the whole page.

This is a problem because in live sites, the average number of installed modules is around 30 for mid-complex sites.

A module filter would resolve this problem. It would improve the Drupal modules interface, but an optimal solution would be to add UX improvements to the Drupal core.

I have used this product for around four years.

I have not really experienced any stability issues with the Drupal core. In some cases, we found some issues in the contributed modules. However, these bugs usually already have a patch available. If a patch doesn't exist, then we try to fix it and contribute back.

I did not encounter any scalability issues. The scalability/modularity is one of the principle features of this CMS.

The Drupal community gives excellent support to the Drupal core. Usually a reported bug does not last more than a week before it is attended to.

This is very relative. If you are using other contributed projects like the DrupalVM or Kalabox, the initial setup is less complex, because you don't have to configure all of the web stack (which is usually LAMP).

On the other hand, if you want to have your custom environment self-configured, you have to organize all the system requirements to run Drupal properly. This will include a web server (Apache, Nginx), a SQL database (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the PHP language, and helper tools like Drush.

As I said before, Drupal is free software and is covered by GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. You can find more information here:

https://www.drupal.org/about/l...

Every time prior to commencing a new project, we always evaluated the viability of the development of the project with Drupal. In one case, Drupal did not meet the requirements for the front-end of the site, but it met the backend requirements.

In that case, we developed two products, one front end developed in Angular JS and one Drupal as backend with custom web services to feed the Angular App.

I think the best advice is to be patient and persevering. Drupal is a very large tool and you will need to read a lot documentation and view some examples to start with it.

1. The amount of functionality provided, both in the core product and in the thousands of community-developed modules.
2. The ability to review – and edit -- the code when needed.
3. The ability to find independent organizations and individuals who provide Drupal services.
4. The community, and its helpful, collaborative nature.

Because of Drupal, we now have the ability to provide our customers with multilingual, multi-regional content to an extent that would not have been possible otherwise.

1. There are not enough Drupal developers to satisfy demand.
2. Upgrading to new major versions has historically been complex and difficult. Hopefully the migration functionality being built for Drupal 8 will ease this work.

Since 2009

We did not have enough knowledge of how Drupal-specific development practices affect site performance. Fortunately, Acquia had consultants on board who quickly identified the areas that needed to be addressed.

No.

No.

Customer Service: 5 starsTechnical Support: 5 stars

Yes. One site was built on a home-grown content management system. A second was built on Xoops. Others were built on Microsoft Content Management Server. We switched the first to lower risk and to enhance our ability to provide new functionality. We switched the second because we were unable to continue supporting our forked installation of Xoops. We switched from the others to improve productivity and enable us to provide new functionality.

Straightforward.

Both. We augmented our internal team with Drupal experts. I would rate the experts’ level of expertise as a 4.

No licensing fees, no annual maintenance fees. Original implementation cost (for our first site) was several hundred thousands of dollars, and day-to-day cost is the cost of employees and contractors to maintain and enhance the sites.

Hundreds, including both commercial and open source. Name them, and we probably evaluated them.

If you plan on implementing it yourself, and you don’t already have Drupal experts on your team, don’t. Even if you believe you have the smartest developers in the world, you need to have experienced Drupal developers for technical guidance and to help ensure that your team uses Drupal development best practices.

Its ability to style the article module is the most valuable feature. It gives the developer the flexibility to show the articles the way he/she wants.

When developing a site, it's important to have flexibility for displaying the contents the way you want. You do not have to depend on the default layouts that the theme provides. It improves the site's readability and sense of professionalism.

It has to improve the speed of the admin section. Sometimes you will get stuck while updating the configurations, especially because it uses AJAX in the interface.

I have used this solution for more than three years.

There were only JavaScript conflicts. This is especially the case if you use lots of modules that utilize JavaScript.

There were no scalability issues. This product can be scaled as much as you want.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10. When you post on the Drupal module's page in the support section, you always get helpful answers from the various developers out there.

We did not use any other solution before.

The initial setup was straightforward. However, you still need to read the documentation and watch the tutorials, so you will be able to configure, use it properly, and utilize most of its features.

This product is free.

We did look at other options, but there's no better solution than this module.

Try it. Find out its full potential by first watching the tutorials and then think how you can implement it with your own website or project.

As an ASA. As a primarily back-end developer, the extensible OO architecture is the most valuable, along with the CMS and related services it provides, such as revisioning, workflow, translation, and API scaffolding.

Drupal has made it possible to address a wide breadth of web site requirements.

The current version represents a new architecture for the product: Object-oriented sitting atop Symfony 2, rather than procedural.

The kinks are still being worked out, so there is an opportunity to improve on the current state of most of it. APIs are improved, and the originals were deprecated but were left in place. Features that weren't ready for release are completed and added, such as media handling, due in 8.3.

New features that are being considered are added as experimental modules: They come disabled, but can be enabled by the admin.

Drupal, like the Enterprise, birthed new versions from the ashes of the old. Starting with D8, it improves as it journeys.

I have used Drupal for about 10 years. I used D8 since its release, for about a year and a half.

No issues with stability. It was vetted very well in beta and it has been stable.

Drupal 8 has an architecture that will scale well and better than previous versions, especially given big pipe. This will allow for scaling, even with authenticated users. This is something that was not possible in earlier versions.

Despite being open source, Drupal has a large and active community. Support, though voluntary, is rarely hard to find.

Drupal 8 can be somewhat complex to set up because of the supporting technologies that should be installed, such as Composer, Drush, and Drupal Console.

It's free.

We did not evaluate other options.

Drupal for end users is fairly straightforward. For developers, the learning curve to be proficient is about two years.

The new component-based content management is very helpful. It is cludgy at first, but maintenance is very nice among many content contributors.

It makes it easier for multiple people to contribute content and handle who has access to what. Very few CMS systems have such granular, controllable access permissions.

I liked the configuration being more database oriented. The file-based configuration is nicer for deployment and makes it quicker. However, the other 99% of the time, it's a pain in the butt.

They drew the line between what is "config" and what is "content". What is config is file passed, is exported, pushed to the server and imported as configuration.

This make a large deployment much easier, quicker and cleaner. However, when you want to add a permission to a user role, something as simple as that checkbox, forces a config push, which annoys me.

At a certain point that takes away from what a CMS should be. I get the
file based for some basic config storage, but at a certain point it really
gets in the way of productivity.

I've been using Drupal for many years, starting with, I believe, version 5. I used version 6, for sure, and now I am getting into version 8. I am about ready to take some certification courses.

There have been no stability issues.

There have been no scalability issues.

There is no support other than the user community, which tends to be far better than most paid support.

I've used many solutions over the years. Some are easier, but they tend to be less scalable. Drupal is a great balance.

It is pretty simple to install, but more complex to configure and get going.

I have no advice. It's free!

We've always looked at many alternatives and Drupal always rises above for a large scale contributor base, general security, and lack of vulnerabilities.

Educate yourself and take your time.