Drupal Reviews

<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.

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.

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 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.

• Custom distributions: Supports multiple sites that share functionalities
• Localization: Provides content solutions across different regions and languages
• Analytics: Enable page load and event tracking
• Robust Permissioning: Facilitates different users to get different permissions
• Organic Groups: Supports the sub-groups within an organization
• Workbench Moderation: Supports the editorial workflow
• Flagging: Empowers the site's audience to positively affect the content
• Rules: Provides a framework to transparently automate tasks
• Messaging Notifications: It is a powerful tool that supports workflows

The idea is to use a custom distribution. This empowers each site to do the unsexy, boring, but critical functionality. Then they can use the powerful design over it.

The classic open source pain points, such as documentation and many charlatan developers, need improvement.

I have used this solution for five years.

Customization, such as code introduced outside of the core and contributed functionality, that is introduced, can cause instability.

Like in most of the successful trending tools, the same things that make Drupal great also make it not-so-great.

For example, the fact that Drupal core and contributed code operates 'in the wild' and in front of so many users, it gives it, in effect, the benefit of the largest UAT for any CMS.

That coupled with the fact that its developer community is constantly making updates (e.g., security enhancements, support for new versions of libraries and standards, handling of edge cases, etc.), makes the documentation effort more problematic.

In fact, successful Drupal developers often use the code itself as the documentation. It helps to use the advanced debugging tools, in order to quickly understand how a particular piece of Drupal code works.

This is ironic, since the developer must then use the knowledge to write Drupal code which, as a rule, must be written generically and not tightly coupled to specific technologies.

The other thing to keep an eye out for, is that Drupal developers move too fast to resolve issues, especially the short-term consultants.

Often, organizations will employ short-term consultants at a much lower rate, than proven developers who maybe from a reputable agency or firm.

In these cases, the short-term issues/enhancements are implemented and the consultant moves on. However, more often than not, the work performed creates problems down the line because an unmaintainable approach was taken.

Thus, it is important to note that this phenomena is not unique to Drupal. Rather, Drupal's trending status, combined with the various options,that the developers have to implement the same functionality, seems to breed this type of situation very well.

The wide number of implementation options will often cause developers without a lot of Drupal experience to paint themselves into a corner.

The technical support is below average as compared to all the other products. It is above average for open source CMSs.

Previously, I have used a variety of solutions, including the custom ones. I switched solutions because Drupal provides all the features that I need.

The installation was super easy. You just need to run the Wizard.

It is free, but I would recommend spending the money on quality Drupal hosting, instead of cheaper solutions, such as Pantheon and AWS.

We looked at other solutions namely WordPress, Joomla!, CakePHP, and Symfony.

If you do not need the features that I have mentioned above, then do not use 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.