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.

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.

We find the solution pretty stable.

The solution is very scalable. We like it.

Our developers haven't really needed much help from technical support from Drupal.

In terms of implementing Drupal, for us (the developers) it was pretty straightforward. There wasn't much of an issue.

We have Drupal developers on staff, so we were able to implement the solution ourselves.

At this point, we find that Drupal is great for our developers but not so great for our users.

If a company is going to implement Drupal, I would advise that the organization makes sure they have a Drupal specialist on staff.

We use the Acquia and Thunder. We'd give a very high score to the solution: 9 out of 10.

I work with it.

It is good for big projects.

Module system.

It is a little bit simplified.

We have built a production ready, heavy content website using this product within two to three months.

• It is very developer friendly.
• You can build websites on it very quickly.

Overall business friendliness of the product: Digital experience features like target segmentation and campaign management have a long way to go.

Several modules which worked well on the previous version of the product have not yet been upgraded or do not work seamlessly anymore on the newer version.

Not yet.

Its ability to style the article module is the most valuable feature. It gives the developer the flexibility to show the articles the way he/she wants.

When developing a site, it's important to have flexibility for displaying the contents the way you want. You do not have to depend on the default layouts that the theme provides. It improves the site's readability and sense of professionalism.

It has to improve the speed of the admin section. Sometimes you will get stuck while updating the configurations, especially because it uses AJAX in the interface.

I have used this solution for more than three years.

There were only JavaScript conflicts. This is especially the case if you use lots of modules that utilize JavaScript.

There were no scalability issues. This product can be scaled as much as you want.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10. When you post on the Drupal module's page in the support section, you always get helpful answers from the various developers out there.

We did not use any other solution before.

The initial setup was straightforward. However, you still need to read the documentation and watch the tutorials, so you will be able to configure, use it properly, and utilize most of its features.

This product is free.

We did look at other options, but there's no better solution than this module.

Try it. Find out its full potential by first watching the tutorials and then think how you can implement it with your own website or project.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

This depends on whether Drupal wants to become user-friendlier toward non-developers. The GUI is still not as intuitive as WordPress. This is not an issue if you are comfortable with coding in PHP, JavaScript, CSS3, HTML 5, and have a basic understanding of Object Oriented Programming.

Migration of Drupal 7-based modules to Drupal 8 is still lagging behind. Many of your favorite D7 modules may not be completely migrated to a D8 format. On the plus side, the Drupal community is working hard to migrate D7-based modules to D8.

I used Drupal 7 for three years, and Drupal 8 for one year.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give technical support a high rating.

I used WordPress. I switched because I learned how to code in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. Drupal made it easier to customize a website by working directly with the API and the code.

The initial set up was challenging as Drupal has a very steep learning curve. Drupal 8 is easier and a little more intuitive, but it is still a steep learning curve. With Drupal 8, you also have to be somewhat familiar with Object Oriented Programming if you want to understand how to extend its functionality beyond simple plug-and-play systems. This may not be the case with people not oriented toward programming or coding. In that case, OOP and the new structure of D8 will prove overwhelming.

Drupal is open source. There is no pricing and licensing.

• MODX (PHP-based)
• Rails (based on Ruby)

Go for it! If you know how to code in PHP, CSS3, and HTML 5, your experience will be much easier and you will appreciate Drupal much more. For anyone thinking of switching to Drupal, I would recommend finding a developer or designer who is already familiar with Drupal 7 and particularly version 8.

I would rate it higher, but I also use Ruby on Rails, and MODX (PHP-based), which provide a more flexible, more code hacking, development framework. Drupal is a favorite and I will continue to support its development and will use it in situations where I feel that it will benefit a client over other solutions.