Drupal Reviews

Drupal is one of the most robust content management systems. My favorite features are:

• The ability to create content types using Drupal's field system
• A robust categorization tool provided by Drupal's taxonomy system
• Access control using the user roles and permissions
• Extensibility using thousands of contributed modules

• Admin Interface: You'll often hear that Drupal has a pretty high learning curve. I attribute that to its admin interface. New users can find it pretty difficult to understand. It's rarely intuitive and lacks hints/suggestions.

• Example Content: Drupal doesn't come with any default content. When you set up and start using Drupal, you'll find that it's pretty empty. With the addition of the example content (preferably with guides/tours), it would be possible to make Drupal easier to understand.

• Lack of good and ready-to-use themes: Drupal.org provides thousands of themes, but most of the time, they are not ready-to-use. Most of these themes are what we call "base themes", i.e., you need to extend (using sub-themes) or modify (in code) to get exactly what you need.

I have been using Drupal for the past five years.

Until now, we have not experienced any stability issues. Drupal has regular security, feature updates, and the Drupal community is always there for any kind of support that you might need.

Verbatim from Drupal.org (https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/managing-site-performance-and-scalability):

Drupal is a complex application. A well-configured Drupal site can be highly performant and can scale to many millions of visitors per day. Conversely, a poorly optimized site can be frustratingly slow for its users.

In our project, we've followed guidelines from drupal.org as to how to optimize its performance for scalability. It has helped us to serve our site from tens to thousands of regular users.

Drupal has pretty good documentation for reference. You can always find support from the Drupal community via drupal.org, drupal.stackexchange.com, or on Drupal IRC channels, if you're into that kind of thing.

I started my career in Drupal. I didn't use any other solution before.

To set up Drupal, you need a web server with PHP and DBMS. This is supported by Drupal. MySQL is the most common one, but Drupal supports others as well.

There are various tools for local setup (Acquia Dev Desktop), for hosting services and for the cloud setup (Pantheon, Platform.sh). These are preconfigured for Drupal and are really easy to set up.

In case you want to setup Drupal from scratch, you need basic information about the servers and file permissions. In that case, you'll find that Drupal is pretty easy to set up.

Drupal is a free and open-source product, which is always a plus point in my opinion.

Drupal is a fantastic tool for content management, but it has a pretty high learning curve.

For very simple solutions, such as for setting up a blog or a static informational website, you might find that Drupal is overkill. There are other, better tools available for such tasks. However, if you want something robust and secure, Drupal is a good choice.

• The most valuable features are flexibility, robustness, and community support.
• Has a very customizable web platform. You can build a lot of different solutions on top of it.
• It is robust, secure, and maintained by a very large community of developers.
• Community: The most important feature. The Drupal community is awesome and will provide you with all the support, training, and answers you might need when using it.

It allows your web site or web application to grow along with your business. You don’t have to rebuild your technical solution every time your business changes. You can just extend its functionality.

They can improve their migration tools and processes. Migrating from one version to another can be very complex.

I have been using Drupal for more than five years.

We had some stability issues. Some modules are not production-ready. This is the case specifically with the most recent version of Drupal.

If custom development follows the best practices and standards, it shouldn’t be any problem. However, when custom parts don’t follow the standards, there could be room for scalability problems.

Technical support is given by the community itself. It gets a rating of 4.5/5.

I’ve used WordPress as well. They are usually compared with each other. However, they are both good at solving different problems. You can achieve similar results, but they are better depending on your project.

WordPress is usually simpler and less expensive. It’s ideal for marketing websites, landing pages, blogs, and small e-commerce sites.

Drupal is better for larger and more enterprise-type sites. It can be expensive, but it provides more security and better scalability than WordPress.

The Drupal installation is simple. However, it is complex to start because you don’t get an out-of-the-box working website with all of what you need. You get a web platform with a lot of great tools and pieces to start building.

Drupal is an open source platform, so it doesn’t require any payment for the license.

I evaluated WordPress and I used it for several projects. I evaluated Joomla! and Magento.

Check if Drupal is the right tool for your project and business. Drupal projects can be expensive. Sometimes finding good developers is a hard task and the learning curve is very steep.

But it is worth it if you require an enterprise level web platform with great scalability, support, and security.

If you need a simpler website, and your budget is limited, it might be a good idea to check other tools like WordPress.

• Ease of use: Drupal creates easy authoring workflows, flexible content architecture, and allows you to publish content on a single site. You can also publish across multiple sites, with multilingual and multi-device support.
• Flexibility: With Drupal, unlike proprietary CMSs, you are not restricted to a fixed set of features. You have the freedom to choose from numerous plug and play modules. You can create a CMS with the exact feature set that’s relevant to your digital strategy.
• Scalability: Drupal is built to scale up with your business requirements, with seamless additions of new features and functionalities as you grow. Unlike proprietary CMSs, you will not pay a heavy license fee for usage and upgrade.
• Security: Drupal is a proven, secure CMS, with a global team of security experts who validate and respond to security issues. This, coupled with an active, open source community, ensures that you will have a security patch available, even before you know of vulnerability.

• Community: The open source community drives Drupal. With over 23,000 contributed modules, there’s a high chance that any feature you want has already been built, and is available for you to use at no cost.

Since adopting Drupal as our flagship technology offering, we've gone on to service some of the largest corporations, non-profits, and agencies globally. We're Asia's largest boutique Drupal consulting firm.

It needs a better UI for the back-end user.

I have been using Drupal since 2007.

We did not have any stability issues that were very serious.

Scalability is one of the key factors that make Drupal so widely accepted.

We are fastidious in ensuring our enterprise users have all the support they need to be successful.

We switched from TYPO3 to Drupal consulting, as Drupal offers better value to our customers.

Being open source, Drupal can be set up by just about anybody. It’s the customization and integrations that require technical skills.

Drupal is open source. There is no licensing fee.

We did not evaluate any alternatives.

If Drupal meets your specific requirements, please go right ahead.

Content creation and management is highly robust with the ability to add any content type you could think of whether it be text, video, imagery, or more functional content like polls or forums.

At Appnovation Technologies we leverage Drupal’s out of the box features and functionality in order to speed up development and delivery time for our clients. This allows us to focus more on creating high quality customizations and custom front end development which in the end produces an incredibly high quality and robust content management system.

As with most if not all web technologies, theres always an initial learning curve that can seem daunting. These days however there are excellent online resources such as buildamodule.com that provides video training for Drupal which can be a lot easier to digest than reading documentation sometimes. That being said, there is some great documentation over at Drupal.org that would be a must-read for anyone considering Drupal for their next project.

I have been designing and developing using the Drupal CMS for the last 8 years.

Your hosting will likely determine how easy the deployment process is since Drupal relies on various versions of PHP-5.x and above, as well as various extensions. More often than not, starting up Drupal on your local environment will introduce you to some of these dependencies before they would pop up in a production environment. There are various solutions out there for hosting, but the folks over at Acquia definitely have a great setup that is incredibly easy to use, which makes deployment an absolute breeze. Taking this a bit further, knowledge in Git also helps deploying between various environments if you’re in need of a development/staging/production environment stack.

Stability is often a concern for large scale deployments, and Drupal can handle those - but expertise in Drupal coding standards, and front end performance are at the forefront of creating a stable environment. Outside of human knowledge, Drupal itself has some great caching functionality included in its core. Page caching and compression, CSS and JavaScript compression and aggregation are also included in core functionality as well.

For your first time, you’ll need to read up on the Drupal.org documentation on how to set up a site locally. As you go through that process yourself, if you run into any issues Drupal will show you error messages pointing you in the right direction to troubleshoot. You should be able to do a quick google search for anything that looks foreign to you, just make sure you add ‘Drupal 7’ (or whatever version you’re using) to your search query to narrow down the results. A base understanding of MySQL will be required in order to set up a database, or at the very least you’ll need to know how to use tools such as PHPmyAdmin or other apps like Sequel Pro will definitely come in handy.

My advice would be to get your hands on an installation of Drupal, get it going and play around with creating content, using modules and just generally exploring the various settings that are part of Drupal core. After that, it’s up to you to determine whether Drupal can meet your goals or use cases. If you’re still unsure, there are various case studies out there to read up on which may help your decision making process. On top of all of that, if you’re really serious about implementing Drupal, finding a good web development team with a strong understanding of Drupal standards is a must have. There are a lot of individuals and agencies out there doing incredible work with Drupal, so I would definitely recommend leveraging that if at all possible.

It is a very powerful tool for the developer's hands and also, it's very easy for the content editors to use.

It's a framework integrated with CMS. The advantage of having a framework with CMS is that you make the software useful for both the developer teams and the content editors, at the same time. You can create rich experiences by allowing the developers to extend what is already provided and at the same time, making the CMS experience even richer.

Drupal 8 did a great step by integrating with the Symfony Framework. Now, the documentation is easier to read through and it's more intuitive.

There is need for better organization of the documentation on the drupal.org site.

We have been using Drupal versions 6, 7 and 8 for around eight years.

We encountered some stability issues, only when the modules/profiles/themes are on the development version (but not always).

So far, Drupal 8 has been doing an excellent job with all the integrations that it provides. So the answer is, so far, there were no scalability issues.

Technical support is a community, so it goes from the junior to senior consultants.

We have used WordPress before, but not for so long, so I can't really compare.

The setup is pretty simple and intuitive. It, of course, involves a little bit of technical knowledge, such as how to set up the DB and giving some folders a special writing permission.

It is an open-source project; it is totally free.

It was more like Drupal chose me, I was working for J&J and this was its framework.

Read about it, ask the community and NEVER EVER change the Drupal core.

• The robust API and the large number of contributed modules created by the community
• The API uses a consistent hook system to allow you to build custom modules which "hook" into Drupal seamlessly. For example, these could be used to add new user permissions, page blocks, or to simply alter the text on a form button.
• The Drupal contributed modules are those that are built and maintained by the community members. There's a saying in the Drupal community "There's a module for that." Quite often, there is already a module for the functionality that you need, or one very close to it.
• The key contributing modules are views, panels, Ctools, token, and Pathauto. A number of key contributing modules have ended up in the Drupal core in recent years.

It has cut down the development time and given us a great base to build out any type of site that is needed.

The admin interface has been lacking in usability. They have made improvements in the new versions.

In the previous versions of Drupal, the admin UI was confusing to non-technical users. This has improved, but it probably isn't as user-friendly as WordPress, for example.

I have used this solution for over ten years.

Drupal, Version 8, which was released a few months back, still has some blocking bugs. However, the stability of Drupal, in general, is very solid.

Drupal may require a lot of resources for certain types of sites, but hosting and well-architected codes can get around this.

The technical support is entirely community-based, i.e., via Stack Overflow or Drupal.org. It could be better.

I worked with the Joomla!, but the product reached its limits. We switched to Drupal.

The initial installation process is much more improved and relatively straightforward. It’s still a bit developer-orientated, which can be confusing for non-developers.

Drupal is open source software, so it can be used for free.

We looked at Joomla!

Be patient and expect a learning curve. In the end, you’ll have a solid CMS platform with which to work.

<ol> <li>Feature-rich</li> <li>Open source </li> <li>Highly extendable</li> <li>Being actively developed</li> <li>Helpful, collaborative community</li> <li>free</li> </ol>

Significantly less time spent on production issues and maintaining existing functionality, translating into significantly more time adding new and enhanced functionality.

Migration from one major version to the next major version requires significant effort.

I have been using this solution for 5 years.

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

Initially, yes. Help from experienced consultants ameliorated this.

Customer Service: Excellent. There are always people in the community online and willing to have discussions. Each individual “module” (i.e., extension) has an issue queue where questions and issues can be brought up, discussed, and resolved. And there are consultancies available for contracted support.Technical Support: Excellent. The technical level of the community is high, as is that of consultancies.

Yes, several. Moved one site from flat files and homegrown systems, and others from Microsoft CMS 2002, all to enhance our ability to provide new and improved features and to decrease risk. Moved another from a customized (and therefore unmaintainable) version of Xoops. Moved others from hosted services to improve supportability.

Setting up Drupal itself is straightforward. Implementing all the functionality required for a large, complex site becomes a large work effort. There are thousands of community modules available to add functionality, so determining the best way to add functionality (if you do not have trusted, experienced Drupal developers in-house) becomes a multi-pronged activity of discussions with the community, searching and comparing existing modules, and decisions about using them versus building custom modules.

Our largest sites have been implemented using blended teams of consultancies and in-house developers. Our smaller sites have been implemented by in-house developers. The vendors we have used have high levels of expertise.

I can’t provide numbers, but I can say that our key metrics have improved dramatically.

Zero setup cost for most of our sites. We acquired servers to ensure our largest sites could handle large volumes of visitors. Our ongoing day-to-day cost is just the cost of employee time. We have a small devops team managing the infrastructure and several small teams of developers creating new and improved functionality.

We evaluated hundreds of other options.

Do NOT implement your first site without the aid of an experienced, collaborative expert. It is very easy to build a Drupal site extremely poorly, and an expert will guide you toward using Drupal the way it works best.

The most valuable are the security features and a wide array of available modules, or extensions, that can be used to add functionality to a Drupal website.

Our website, debugacademy.com, was built in Drupal. We use it to review student applications to our Drupal Development Course.

It needs better and more themes available for download, like you have in WordPress.

I have used this for 16 months.

We have not had any stability issues. Another good thing about Drupal is that it gets a lot of updates.

We have not had scalability issues. Drupal is designed for complex and large websites.

I would give technical support a rating of 5/5. The Drupal community is a very passionate and helpful one.

We did not have a previous solution.

The setup is definitely complex. In order to develop a Drupal website, you have to set up a local development environment or server.

Drupal is free to use since it is open source software. However, Drupal developers are expensive.

We didn’t look at any alternatives.

Make sure you know Drupal before getting into it. Take a Drupal course like the one we have.