Drupal Reviews

We are an agency so we created a Drupal website for our customers. Our primary use case is to put a Drupal website on our hosting web. So we use the solution on the cloud and then we also have one customer that uses it on-premise. 

The feature I find most valuable is that Drupal is a framework and not only a CMS. And I like that it's a good product to manage complex digital solutions.

I would like to see better pricing because Drupal is an open-source technology. And then I also think the support needs to improve, as well as the integration with tracking and analytics systems. Translation management should also improve.

The solution is very stable.

I believe the solution is scalable. 

We haven't used this solution's technical support yet. I do, however, think that it is good. Whenever I need technical support from Drupal due to a bug issue or some other problem, I will always ask the community first before bothering the Drupal team. I understand that Acquia has a service level agreement to contact the supporter when we have a website in the mission-critical context. But I have never used it, until now.

The initial setup was easy and straightforward. It took us about an hour to deploy the program, but customization took a little longer.

My advice to others would be that Drupal is not only a CMS, you need to learn the Drupal fundamentals before to start the project. Drupal is a handy tool whenever you work on a digital infrastructure broad project and not only a simple website. So if you have a big project, you can use Drupal. But if you have a small website, like a blog or simple website, my advice would be not to use Drupal, because Drupal is too complex and the cost to maintain the platform can be too high, related to the value of your website, for example. If you have a website with a big product catalog, for example, in many languages and in many countries in the world, then Drupal is good. But if you have a simple website, like a portfolio or five page-website, you can use many other technologies that'd be simple to maintain and implement.

On a scale from one to 10, I will rate Drupal an eight. In the next release, I would like to see basic page buttons and better integration with the analytics platform. A drag and drop function to create simple pages will also be handy. For example, if a customer wants to create a landing page, it should be easy for him or her to do so. I would also like to see better translation management.

I work with it.

It is good for big projects.

Module system.

It is a little bit simplified.

• 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 themes and modules are valuable features of this product. We can easily enhance the application's performance.

The modules need to be improved. It would be great if we could add custom PHP codes to some regions on the template. This would be used for adding and retrieving data from the database.

I have used this solution for about one year.

We did not encounter any stability issues.

We did encounter some scalability issues when I tried to add custom PHP codes. I searched Google for a solution, but I couldn't find anything.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

I was not using any other product previously. I started web development with Drupal, Version 7.

I encourage others to use this product. It is a very powerful CMS tool with a lot of themes and modules. It is great for enterprise use.

- Ease of Customization

- Expandability

- Company website build in Drupal

- Drupal Community and Forums not as easy and straightforward as Wordpress

- The number of areas covered by existing plugins should be larger

- Resource Hungry, compared to Wordpress

2 years

No issues

No issues

No issues

Not needed

Not needed

Joomla, Wordpress. I typically use Wordpress for smaller websites, with less customization required and Drupal for larger websites that may need to expand in the future.

Straightforward

In house

-

Drupal is Free.

Joomla, Wordpress

Make sure you know what kind of website you want to build and who will be using it.

It is good to note the following:

- Drupal has enterprise level security. Numerous government websites are build on Drupal so if security is a number one priority Drupal is your CMS

- As far as SEO is concerned, things can go really bad for Drupal if the developer does not know what he/she is doing, or does not understand customer needs. If SEO is done correctly Drupal is as good for SEO as any other CMS

- Use Drupal if expandability is a must or if you are building a large website with various kinds of functionality. For smaller websites and blogs, Wordpress is king.

Views, terms, panels, and entity conception. It is a very useful and fast solution to build successful web applications.

We built a few powerful applications on D7 and it was very fast.

It requires a lot of server resources. It should be optimized.

We have been using this solution for seven years.

We had stability issues. I have a lot of 'Out of memory' issues.

We had issues with scalability.

Drupal has a very cool community, so the technical support is pretty high.

To build more powerful apps, we switched to Symfony 3.0.

The setup was easy.

It's free.

There are a lot of solutions 'in the sea'. At the time, we choose Drupal because of its flexibility.

Try it! It's free and fun.

• It's extensible with so many modules.
• The environment allows for rapid prototyping.
• It provides security updates more often.
• It has a huge community and support from all over the web.

• It needs a shorter learning curve.
• It needs to improve resources usage.

• Content management: It helps the end user to input/update the content on his own without approaching the developer, once the site is built.
• Awesome community.
• A large number of modules which help in extending the functionality.
• An open-source solution.
• It is a secure solution.
• There is a constant development of new core features.

Since Drupal is not developed for any specific use cases, it has some learning curve and requires effort to learn. Thus, there is a need for good documentation.

I have used this solution for more than three years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

If you purchase Drupal-specific hosting vendors like Acquia/Pantheon/Platform.sh, then you get Premium Support or else you need to go for IRC, Drupal Slack or forums.

The initial setup is easy and straightforward.

It is an open-source product, so there are no licensing fees, vendor lock-in, etc. involved.

If you need an open-source, scalable and secure CMS, then go for Drupal.

The Drupal project is an open-source solution and is supported by an awesome community of developers. It doesn't belong to any specific vendor.