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.

It is easy to build and maintain a web page.

I sell car cameras (dash cameras) and I decided to build a site where the customers can publish their interesting recordings. The site was built on Drupal in three hours.

Modifying the themes (colors, dimensions, and pictures) could be easier.

I have used Drupal for three years.

I have had no problems with stability.

I have had no problems with scalability.

If technical support includes the on-line forums, then it is perfect.

Before Drupal, I used static HTML web pages.

The setup was not complex. Step-by-step instructions help you during the setup.

This is a free product.

I did not evaluate other options.

Check the free templates first. Check how you can create a database on your web admin page. Then start.

• 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.

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.

Drupal could always have more developers. However, with recent announcements for backwards compatibility in the future, we are hoping to be able to leverage Drupal in the future, too.

I have been using Drupal since 2008. However, I believe that my company has been using since 2011.

Generally, we don’t have stability issues.

We gain technical support from a number of external vendors as well as internal teams. In general, this is excellent.

We have used a number of frameworks. However, due to its flexibility and community size, at the moment it is the preferred proof-of-concept platform.

Unfortunately, with Drupal, there is a number of learning paradigms that you have to discover, which can make it difficult to understand as a newcomer. However, once these have been crossed, the value grows exponentially.

As with a good proportion of open-source software, it is provided without cost. It uses the GPLv2 license, so that is needed to be understood to use the software.

Drupal is not provided by a Vendor, it is open source software, and therefore, doesn't have direct support or suchlike by any one vendor, but in general by the community of developers who work on it. This makes it similar to Joomla (not exactly like WordPress, as it is open-sourced, but controlled by Automattic).

We have some other frameworks that we use and some other software. It is a matter of choosing the correct software for the job and Drupal's flexibility and scalability mean that it is a useful, multi-purpose software for web applications.

Find a trusted partner and make sure that you engage with the community. There are hundreds of meetups for Drupal enthusiasts around the world.

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.

The learning curve is the thing that scares most people away from using Drupal. With Drupal Version 8, it has taken a more standardized way by teaming up with the Symfony framework.

This, however, is a double-edged sword. It takes you a step further away from the typical front-end developers that had found their gem in Drupal Versions 6 and 7. By its procedural nature, they were able to build semi-complex websites without any real programming and object oriented programming knowledge.

Everything below Drupal 8 was aimed at being a procedural application where you can make changes by using hooks they provide in their code (a small amount were Object Oriented, but most people would never touch this). This allows for an easy way to modify existing pages for the non-programmers who know how to write scripts a little. But these hooks are very specific to Drupal itself (hence the steep learning curve) and aren’t very intuitive if you look at PHP frameworks/applications as a whole. The documentation on how to do things as a complete novice is only subpar in both Drupal 7 & 8. By now there are plenty how-to tutorials on how to do things in Drupal 7 luckily.

With Drupal 8 they decided to use Symphony2 as the base framework for the system. This allows for best practices in that framework to be used and allow the vast community of symphony2 programmers to make a switch to Drupal since it leans closer to home than the procedural approach from the previous version. Almost everything is now Object Oriented and the amount of hooks (the old procedural approach) has been pushed back to a minimum. This makes it more difficult for the previously mentioned non-programmers. They are now looking at a huge time-investment to learn OO Programming to get started in Drupal 8. I believe this is the reason why Drupal 8 is making such a slow start compared to Drupal 6 & 7. It’s a good product but they made it so much harder for the people who can write basic PHP scripts.

The main area of improvement would be better/more documentation and tutorials on how to do things in Drupal 8 at this moment. It’s a leap of faith for the non-programmers out there and some of them just completely thrown off by it. This is what incites projects like https://backdropcms.org/ where they fork Drupal 7 to keep it going after it reaches EOL.

I’ve been a Drupal developer for eight years. Drupal Version 6 is what I used when I first started with Drupal development. For legacy reasons, I still actively develop some applications in this version. I have used Drupal Version 7 for five years and it is still the most used to date. I have used Drupal Version 8 only for a year, but for nothing overly complex yet.

I haven’t had any real stability issues.

When we built an application reaching 200k unique hits, we were suffering from severe slowness. We had to change our approach to caching and the use of a load-balanced setup.

We made a load-balanced setup consisting of four nodes and added a Varnish and Memcache dedicated instance per node.

This allowed us to have a response time of less than a second, even with 200k unique hits per hour.

As mentioned before, the real strength of Drupal is the vast community who the product really relies on.

You will have to learn most things yourself, but if you have any questions, most of the community members are willing to help you with your problems.

We have used many different systems before, ranging from TYPO3, Umbraco, and even a custom CMS. The reasons to change to Drupal were:

• Ease of deployment
• One-sprint releases
• Security
• Out-of-the-box support for a good load-balanced solution
• No stale cache problems

The basic setup of Drupal is easy and straightforward. The learning curve to make complex changes or modules is quite steep in Drupal. This learning curve is even steeper in Drupal Version 8 than it was in Drupal Versions 6 and 7.

They use a specific set of hooks to process your code in the application that takes some time to get used to.

The product itself is free and open source, as well as the contributed modules available on the main website. You have a lot of possibility at hand, free of charge.

We tried a few alternatives, such as Umbraco, TYPO3, and WordPress.

While the learning curve is steep and may seem scary, if you invest time in it, it is well worth it.

It may be a good idea to invest in training and/or literature about development in Drupal. It will teach your best practices and will shorten the learning curve.

I think they are on the right track though. They listen to the community about a lot of things and they try to improve the application itself and the modules by giving coding and security feedback/guidelines.

Drupal Version 7 is mature and will not change. Out-of-the-box, it’s still incomplete as a full-blown CMS.

There is no easy way of building structured pages and a general how-to flow.

All these features have been made available by community-contributed modules afterwards. This makes it a great product, but you depend on a third party’s time and money.

Luckily, they have taken feedback from this version and funneled it in the next version.

I haven’t done enough large-scale projects in Drupal Version 8.

So far, it’s a great product, but the configuration management makes it difficult to work on a single project with multiple developers.

• 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 admin interface could be improved. Compared to Version 7, it was a huge improvement. I think it is not enough for current user needs. Creating complex content types (involving translations), is still a very slow and painful process.

I believe that a new admin interface that stands up with modern UI patterns is critical. A good example is what WordPress did by replacing the old admin interface with a JavaScript based one.

All API functionality is covered by the documentation, but in most cases, it is very limited and lacks good examples. Mostly, it is required to debug into the core of the CMS to understand how to solve some more complex issues.

Drupal 8 lacks a media manager where all assets like pictures, videos, and other media files, can be managed. This is present on other solutions and is a core need for any CMS. There are some contributed solutions but they are unstable or do not meet all the required functionalities. In such case the community is aware and the media initiative (https://www.drupalmedia.org) is in progress with the promise to solve that soon in next updates of Drupal.

I've been using the solution for six months.

Drupal Version 8 is a more or less mature product, since it was launched more than one year ago.

However, when combined with custom implementations and contributed modules, some things seem not stable. Being an open source solution with a large community, it is easy to find a patch or a workaround. However, this requires some knowledge.

Scalability is something that can be related to many factors, depending on your needs and the budget you have. It is also related to the way you architect your solution and therefore how you implement your Drupal website. A bad architecture, in terms of content, can drastically reduce it.

Drupal Version 8 is based on a typical PHP + MySQL/MariaDB + Apache/NGiNX stack. These have been in the market for some time. They are hosting providers who are selling Drupal cloud services with promises of scalability.

Drupal version 8 is an open source solution, so the support is focused on the Drupal community itself.

In most cases, help is present in the form of forums, discussion groups, chats, etc. However, when entering enterprise grade, it is recommended to obtain support from a Drupal specialized company.

There are several available in the market. Some include people who are involved in maintaining the core of Drupal.

I worked in the past with different CMS solutions. Perhaps Vignette was the most relevant. I believe, at that time, it was the most complete and advanced CMS. However, It faced the same issues as many other solutions. It was heavy, lacking in flexibility, and slow to adopt new tech trends.

Drupal is the opposite, since it is not closed software and it does not rely on only one company.

The Drupal Version 8 setup is pretty straightforward. You can do it on the cloud without any technical knowledge or you can do it on your local environment.

To test on the local environment I recommend using:

• Docker (https://www.docker.com) by using Drupal customised containers (https://github.com/wodby/docker4drupal)
• Kalabox (http://www.kalabox.io) - Docker based but with nice UI.

• DrupalVM (https://www.drupalvm.com)

For a quick test, you can use https://simplytest.me. (You can virtually test any version and most of the main modules.)

There is no cost regarding licensing. Costs should be calculated based on the required support and training efforts.

I started with Drupal in 2009. I was working with Vignette and investigated other open source solutions, such as WordPress, Joomla!, and TYPO3.

First invest in internal knowledge and your way to handle strategic decisions, and then find a good provider/partner who can support you when you need it.

Free your mind from other concepts that may be related. This is mostly relevant for people who are quite accustomed to SharePoint and/or other commercial solutions. This is a shift in the paradigm. Embracing Drupal while trying to achieve similar results as these other solutions will never work.

• 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.

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.