Drupal Reviews

The best things about Drupal are its extensibility and plug-ability. You can get something going quite fast that’s feasible for clients to see.

It has a very good authentication/authorization system. For a few years, the application had a dedicated security team who took care of reported security issues with the Drupal core and even contributed modules. The vast user base is a big bonus. You have plenty people collaborating on many modules/plugins, so if you have issues, someone will step in quite fast to help you.

A lot of functionality has been added to the core since Drupal Version 6 allows for people who don’t have a strong technical background to build complex displays of data and pages just by using a WYSIWYG editor.

We have rebuilt a few websites in Drupal. Due to the way Drupal is built, it usually allows us to have new functionality ready in a sprint, where before it could take several months to get into production.

Drupal is an open source content management system which provides an easy installation process, a good range of modules for features' expansion, as well as a supportive community that will help resolve issues that you face with Drupal.

We have been using Drupal for more than 7 years now. Through my different companies we have developed many Drupal sites, from simple ones to complex E-commerce sites and custom made applications.

Drupal 7.x if combined with the appropriate modules and cache mechanisms can provide a robust, fully featured and secure website with endless capabilities. However, for these optimizations to be made, a Drupal expert may be required. It is not as easy to use as Wordpress for example - although Drupal 7.x is vastly improved to Drupal 6.x and Drupal 8.x will be even better.

We have also tried Wordpress and Joomla in various occasions, and while Wordpress is our choice for simple projects, Drupal is always our cost-effective choice for complex projects. It provides flexibility, robust framework, excellent modules for easy expansion and a very good support community.

Configuration API: Makes features configurable and easier to design custom applications. We were able to build several websites that utilize many custom content types. In other words, content that has many unique fields within the type. Drupal’s extensible nature allows me to easily integrate with third-party hosted systems and pull or push data to those systems.

Developing in Drupal is like constructing a custom-designed building from scratch, using all the raw materials and knowing how to put it all together.

Drupal 8 includes Twig for theming. Twig is PHP-based, flexible, fast, and secure. It's much easier to create more functional Drupal websites using Twig, as its templates are written in a syntax that's less complex than a PHP template or others while being more secure. Still, knowing how to tweak the core with PHP is a big advantage.

• Easier to develop custom applications by customizing the code to build and manage websites that require custom content types and workflows.
• It provides built-in, GUI-based, functionality for creating content types, workflow rules, and other custom content management requirements.
• Drupal has a strong built-in user management system that is more of a framework of GUI-based tools that allow you to quickly extend it for your requirements.
• Drupal also offers a well-developed API for extending the system. It's add-on ecosystem is also better managed then some other CMS.
• Powerful command line tools are also available to make operational management tasks.
• Using DRUSH as a command line to update and upgrade modules and security is a big plus.

• Content type definitions: One of the best features of Drupal, and maybe the key differentiator to other solutions, is the way that content is structured and managed. In Drupal Version 8, this was improved. The global process of creating a content type with fields, relations, and translations is more refined and advanced than before.
• Views: In the Drupal Core, views are a quick and advanced way to create listings of content. When using the UI, it is possible to query contents and have the results sorted and filtered by any element. Combined with the template engine, the output can be easily transformed into whatever is required from the design.
• Inclusion of symphony framework: Drupal Version 8 shifted to a full OOP API. The inclusion of pieces from the symphony framework provided some modern patterns in the Drupal core.
• Configuration management: A CMI was implemented for Drupal Version 8, a centralized place to handle and store configurations. This is a huge improvement when compared to Drupal Version 7.
• Content moderation: This wasn’t included in the original 8 version but was incorporated later as an experimental module and will be released as stable on Drupal 8.3. The possibility to have custom workflow around the contents and different states (e.g. draft, published, pending, etc..) is critical for any medium/big website.

My organization sells services around Drupal Version 8.

The velocity of its extensibility and prototyping is a valuable feature. I can quickly take a concept and have a working prototype within several days, rather than in several weeks.

It allows for fewer developers, by leveraging community-built, community-approved modules.

The open source nature of Drupal, being free to extend or alter it is massively important for us. We also use it to build communications. Not being tied to a single vendor means that we can have scale for developers.

It gives the company the ability to quickly spin up ideas, and the scalability to take them further if required.

We use a part of the solution called Acquia. The personalization portion of this is the most valuable aspect fo the solution.

The price could be adjusted. For the client, it's very expensive. if they could make an enterprise equivalent of Acquia which is somewhat cheaper, that would be very helpful.

Scalability would be another item that needs to be improved. We would love to see some form of enterprise scalability.

The user experience in designing layouts should be much easier or much more helpful.

The user interface needs some improvement. The solution should mirror WordPress in that WordPress offers a lot of end-user usability functionality. We would love to see that implemented in Drupal.

I have been convinced since the start that Drupal's greatest asset is its community. Drupal's motto is "Come for the software, stay for the community".

But the community has, from the start, created modules that are now a deep part of Drupal core. They continue to innovate in a lot of different areas.

The web moves fast. Having a big community allows the software to be on top of things in a lot of different areas, such as technical and marketing areas.

By using the open source and free modules provided by the community, you can jumpstart a website project really quickly.

You can concentrate on developing the business part specific to the client, bringing the most added value as fast as possible.

By having a large base of available functionalities, we can guide the client to align his needs with what the product can offer directly.

There is a lot more collaboration between the development team and the client.