Drupal Reviews

• 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.

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.

• 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.

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.

The main complaints of the clients or newcomers to Drupal are about the UX of the admin interface.

Compared to WordPress, Drupal is hard to use. It is a lot more powerful as a site building tool.

In Drupal 8, the UX is now a clear focus with a dedicated team (https://www.drupal.org/communi...-initiatives/drupal-core/usability). Each major version adds a lot in this regard.

I'm really enthusiastic to see what Drupal will become in one year or so. I have already seen what has been made in Drupal 8.

I have used Drupal for almost 10 years. I started using Drupal, Version 4.7, and have consistently used every version since.

The Drupal core is really stable. Depending on the community modules you are using, you may encounter some stability issues.

As a free product, you have to look for a solution to an issue yourself. The community is big. You often see that someone else has found the solution and posted it publicly. Everything is integrated into the product very fast.

Drupal, especially the recent versions, is built to easily integrate with systems like Varnish. Scalability is not an issue, provided that you know how to use this kind of setup.

Drupal 8 goes further. It uses a new cache system which allows integration with a lot of existing performance techniques:

• BigPipe from Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/notes...-engineering/bigpipe-pipelining-web-pages-for-high-performance/389414033919/): Now bundled into the Drupal core
• Turbolinks from Ruby on Rails (https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks): Can be integrated using a community module

It entirely depends on what modules you are using for building your website. Some are well-maintained, but a few are less well-maintained. But there are issue queues for each module where you can find solutions and often patches.

You may also find a lot of Drupal developers in IRC channels at any hour of the day, willing to help for free in a lot of cases.

Some companies, like Acquia, offer full-time support, provided by experienced site builders and developers.

I was a Java developer, developing mostly backend stuff. I switched when the company I was in at the time switched. Drupal was getting some traction in 2007, and it was time for us to try it for building websites.

We are talking 10 years ago, and the product was not what it is today, especially regarding the UX. It was a bit complex. It had no integrated rich text editor, nor native media handling. It is easier today.

Drupal is absolutely free of charge, as are the community modules. So the price entirely depends on the functionalities you want on your website.

I was not involved in the choice.

The first website you build with Drupal will have a lot of mistakes. I would recommend a training session to grasp the basic principles. Use Drupal, Version 8, when you are starting.

The UX keeps getting better and better. Drupal is now a lot easier to start with than a few years back. You will need help to build complex websites, especially regarding what community module you choose and for what situation.

Drupal is currently working on "workspaces", which allow for the revisioning of a whole website. This means having a draft version of the website and a live one. They plan to add that to the core in about a year.

A team is working on allowing deployment of content and configuration from one website instance, like staging, to another instance, such as production. This is based on this workspace feature.

Once both these features are in, Drupal could be chosen not only for its adaptability and ability to tackle big website projects, but for its core functionalities. They are unmatched in the free software CMS world. This is providing that Drupal continues to evolve like it has been doing these past months regarding the UX, especially media integration and the ease of contribution.

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.

Most areas of improvement were resolved in Drupal 8. The stability and infusion of certain elements in Drupal 7 are still absent.

For specific use cases, there are bugs with its DB Query UI tables (Drupal Views). Most of the configurations in Drupal 7 are done in the database, which makes Version Control API much more challenging.

I have used this solution for around 4-5 years.

It depends entirely upon the developers. Well-written code and well-cached displays seldom have performance or display issues.

Bottlenecks exist only at the highest levels. The standard version of Drupal is slightly more demanding than the other baseline platforms, with a hunger for >512MB of memory for rendering heavier scripts.

There is a very active community for occasional issues/questions. Depending on the budget, there is an agency that maintains Drupal core, i.e., Acquia Cloud. This has a similar model that Red Hat uses, which is open-source software with consulting support.

Between the years 2006-2009, I had used SilverStripe as well as WordPress for CMS solutions.

However, SilverStripe had a much smaller community and didn't scale as well for the enterprise solutions.

WordPress was quick to theme, but a pain for add-ons.

The setup of the Hello World module is pretty vanilla. Drupal takes a lot more of customization to make it something your clients seek to use.

Another benefit is that Drupal and its modules are all open-source. There were no upfront concerns about the costs. It makes starting a Drupal site relatively low risk.

WordPress and Joomla! are the current market equivalent competitors. Historically, WordPress is very pretty on the outside, but very ugly/rigid to make large scale customization.

Joomla! is decent. However, it doesn't have the same community/module size.

Drupal developers are in high demand. This makes finding and securing another developer more time consuming and costly.

Drupal is the most powerful and flexible CMS. We can extend it to any level of complexity. 

The version upgrading process is very painful. Moving to a new Drupal version involves much more than building and configuring the new site. Drupal really needs an easy solution for the major version upgrade process, like the one-click WordPress version upgrades.

I have been using this solution since 2005.

Initial setup is straightforward and simple.

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.

One of the things that Drupal needs to improve is the interface. It needs to become more user friendly. It is not as rich in terms of modules as Wordpress is, but it is getting there.

If you have a high traffic site and speed is important, to optimize Drupal you will probably need an expert. 

In regards to the interface it needs to become more user friendly like for example Wordpress or Joomla, so that simple users can administer the site in an easy way and not get lost in menus and options that they don’t understand that may even break the site. Although the interface has improved in comparison to Drupal 6, there are still many things to be done.

The number of modules that Drupal has although adequate, is not nearly as good as the number of modules that Wordpress has. There are times that you cannot find a functionality in Drupal while you can find plenty of options in Wordpress. For example Drupal integration with mailers, the only reliable plugin is for Mailchimp. So if you want to integrate with another platform like Aweber, emma, getresponse etc, you have almost zero choices. While most of the platforms integrate perfectly with Wordpress.

Optimizing Drupal as a high performance site, is not an easy task. You have many options but the most effective ones require server and settings’ modifications, which can be done by experts. However once you have the proper setup, Drupal flies!

• 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.