Drupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP that competes primarily with Joomla and Plone. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features such as account and menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.
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Modern Campus CMS
Score9.2 out of 10
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Modern Campus CMS (formerly Omni Campus) is a CMS for institutions of higher education. It can be deployed as a cloud-based service or hosted locally. It is built in Java, uses open standards, and is extensible through APIs.
Webmaster at Victor Valley College (Higher Education, 501-1000 employees)
Chose Modern Campus CMS
I have evaluated Ektron, PHP Nuke, Drupal, Joomla!, typo3, Reason and SharePoint. OU Campus outshines all of these in the web CMS space. The OU Campus interface is more intuitive, more user-friendly, and the system itself is more flexible and scalable and capable in almost …
Overall, I would give my rating of Drupal a 7/10 because there is an easy user experience for those without a website background but there is some technology work required to build more website capabilities that aren't as user-friendly. Drupal is specifically well suited to update content (like changing Relationship Manager cards when there is employee turnover), post announcements (putting up a holiday banner to let our customers know the dates we will be closed over Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc., and creating a sophisticated website hierarchy of pages (for our firm, several dropdowns depending on if you're looking for personal banking, business banking, investment banking, about us, etc.).
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
OU Campus is the best CMS product I've seen, especially when you have a large organization with less staff and resources. Also, its power, if one team likes marketing, handles all pages and that saves a lot of time and effort. I strongly like the components/snippets. Tags all dynamic modules.
It has excellent security features and consistent updates.
It allows for extensive customization with the integrated themes and core code, especially when you first install it. This allows our dev team to get creative with marketing initiatives.
There is a large online community of Drupal users that consistently help answer any questions and issues
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The JustEdit feature makes updating content a breeze. With a small staff, we rely on others to update their content. OU Campus makes it easy.
Site-wide find and replace. I use the site-wide find and replace feature for all sorts of things - links, enrollment numbers, department names. It's really helpful.
Customer service. The staff at OU Campus answers questions quickly and is always willing to discuss the most effective ways to take on new projects.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Formatting. The page can sometimes look very differently when published than what it looks like while editing. Some improvements have been made in this area with version 10 however.
Find and replace. The command+F needs to find text on the page while editing, not present an actual find and replace dialog box. At least give me the option to simply "find" the text I'm looking for. The dialog box just gets in the way most of the time.
There is not a way to "unpublish" items. At least not a way that I can think of. I would like the ability to pull a page offline without deleting it. Seems like it should be done simpler.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.
As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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%
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Before using OU Campus Content Management System we were using Adobe's DreamWeaver suite for creating and maintaining web pages. The core web development environment was cumbersome to set up. Non-tech people also had trouble understanding how the web works and how web pages are created/maintained. OU Campus Content Management System solved all problems for us.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
