Drupal vs. Modern Campus CMS

We developed a corporate website using Drupal, which features a large number of static pages and several dynamic functions, including a contact us form, location finder, and job posting. We utilized Drupal with some customization to achieve the desired functionalities. We have also worked on e-commerce sites using Drupal, and there is a scope for improvements, specifically in cataloging.

Incentivized

This website works well in an academic setting. It's easy to add pages as your site expands/grows. It's really easy to use and modify pages once you know what you're doing, but it can be a little tricky to get the hang of it at first. It is definitely useful to have in-person or virtual training before you dive in.

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• Content Types... these are amazing. Whereas a more simplistic CMS like Wordpress will basically allow you to make posts and build pages, Drupal 8 gives you the ability to define different types of content that behave differently, and are served up differently in different areas of the website.
• Extensibility... it scales, ohhhh does it scale. They've really figured out server-side caching, and it makes all the difference. Once a page has been cached, it's available instantly to all users worldwide; and when coupled with AWS, global redundancy and localization mean that no matter where you're accessing the site, it always loads fast and crisp.
• Workflows... you have the ability to define very specific roles and/or user-based editorial workflows, allowing for as many touchpoints and reviews between content creation and publication as you'll require.

Incentivized

• Assets are easily managed and can be edited independently of the page they exist on.
• Version history is handled well. Allows for a comment section to note what changes have been made.
• Dependency tags are perfect for media that is used in several places. Upload a photo once, use it in multiple places, edit the photo or its description in one place.

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• Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
• Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
• Steep learning curve, but worth it

Incentivized

• OU Campus could use some improving on their upload changes as far as naming the document because when you are trying to upload the same document with minor revisions, OU Campus requires you to change the name of the document within OU Campus which creates multiple documents in the workfolder.
• When naming documents to upload into OU Campus, it would be nice if we could name out documents the way we would instead of having to put an underscore to indicate a space in the document. Most users of OU Campus has not had proper training to know that you need to do that.

I really like Drupal, and besides the one major issue with not being able to update from version 6 to version 7 and I am happy to continuing using it. Hopefully as time goes on they will make it easier to upgrade or provide better tools for mid-level web designers like myself to build out new sites without the help of expensive 3rd party's.

I don't work at the college any longer, but I believe they will renew the license for the OU Campus Content Management System because of all the great benefits they have had since they initially deployed it. The system is very intuitive and easy to use. Department leads love it. The IT department also loves it because it saves them a lot of time and resources.

It has a very steep learning curve. When starting with Drupal, the functionality and setup have to be learned, which is complex in comparison to tools like WordPress. Drupal is more powerful and can create a wider range of applications, but it definitely has a learning curve. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to make a dynamic web application bigger than the scale of a WordPress blog.

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Once you've been training how to use it, it's really easy to use it on a daily basis

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Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

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As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

Incentivized

The support at OmniUpdate is one of the reasons we continued with the company when time for renewal of contract.

I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

Incentivized

The support team at OmniUpdate is available to assisting campuses with implementation

Drupal's capabilities outpace WordPress by miles. Drupal is more customizable, scales better for larger companies and has advanced content types. If you own a small business or work at a startup company, I would recommend WordPress but if your firm is trying to scale and you have more than 50 employees I would recommend Drupal.

Incentivized

I think the visual editing and version control. If the CMS server is down the website is still live because of content independent of the server.

Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

Incentivized

• Drupal helped us launch a creative, marketing- and product-focused website with custom coding integrations tailored to our goals.
• Drupal allows us to rely on secure and consistently updated core code.
• Drupal's code taxing on the server does start to get a bit heavy as you go along with customizations, so at some point, we decided to stop. We want to ensure our Google Page Score remains high, including paying close attention to page load speed.

Incentivized

• Increased satisfaction with user experience. OU Campus has made it easier for us to address problems when they arise, making our website more efficient.
• Role-based control. Our old CMS made it very easy for users to change fonts and colors on their sections, which was very detrimental to the overall brand. That's not a problem anymore.
• Reduced training times. OU Campus is so easy to use, I've been able to cut training times down by half.

Incentivized