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Drupal

Score6.6 out of 10

379 Reviews and Ratings

What is Drupal?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Top Performing Features

  • Mobile optimization / responsive design

    The CMS helps users build webpages that work well on mobile devices – whether m-dot pages or responsively designed pages.

    Category average: 8.5

  • Content taxonomy

    Users can create multiple levels and types of content categories including tags.

    Category average: 8.2

  • Bulk management

    Users can change an attribute on a group of documents or sites all at once through features such as global search and replace, making bulk changes easier.

    Category average: 7.8

Areas for Improvement

  • Community / comment management

    Users can put post/page comments through an approval process, auto-approve commenters based on their email addresses, block commenters by IP address, delete comments, etc.

    Category average: 7.4

  • WYSIWYG editor

    What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.

    Category average: 7.9

  • SEO support

    The CMS helps users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.

    Category average: 7.4

Drupal Is A Solid Choice For Seasoned Programmers.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Over the years, we've tried out a lot of different CMS systems to create marketing and e-commerce websites for various divisions of the company. Drupal has been around for a long time, and we've given their CMS a ride in hopes of creating a website to showcase some of our company's products and information to visitors from targeted pet groups in our industry.

Pros

  • 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

Cons

  • This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
  • Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
  • The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace

Drupal is an amazing tool for dynamic web applications.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Drupal for more complex web applications and sites. Drupal is a very dynamic tool that can fit many different projects, from a simple website with dynamic content or user access to more complex applications like multiuser social sites. Drupal is a great tool to learn how to apply, although it helps to know PHP and how to customize a website's design (HTML/CSS).

Pros

  • Generate complex websites.
  • Allow different level user roles.
  • Create multi-site applications that have multiple mini-sites on one domain.
  • Build a complex dynamic website for corporate use.

Cons

  • Debugging can be difficult when modules conflict.
  • Permissions can be confusing if you’re not sure of user roles and how they function.
  • A better default image taxonomy and organization would be nice, sans dedicated module.

Return on Investment

  • Drupal has streamlined complex web application creation.
  • Drupal has minimized the need for our developers, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks.
  • Drupal is a great way to quickly implement a custom project.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Concrete CMS, GoDaddy Digital Marketing Suite and Joomla!

Other Software Used

WordPress, Joomla!, Adobe PhotoShop, ShortPixel

Drupal, a hidden gem in the sea of the content management systems out there, a framework of it's own that goes beyond a common CMS

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Drupal daily, that's our main driver for any websites and apps we are developing, this has been the case for the past 12 years for me personally, the scope is as wide as a small local webshop to large enterprise organizations, connecting multiple websites as services to each other, we also use Drupal as a content hub as a headless CMS, or just fetching data off of it with exposed API

Pros

  • Well structured entity definition
  • Designed to be extended, everything can be extended/connected to each other
  • API-first design with the latest versions
  • Great developer experience
  • Huge community, all driven off of open-source contributors

Cons

  • Developer onboarding experience
  • Better marketing materials
  • Better out of box experience
  • Faster innovations/integrations with Javascript ecosystem

Return on Investment

  • Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
  • It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
  • Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Forestry CMS and Craft

Drupal - Not Recommended for Non-Developer Teams

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Drupal to build our website. It was incredibly limited and difficult. Because we are a nonprofit organization, many of our staff are volunteers or part-time. This made it very difficult to make updates, because managing and editing the site were not user-friendly processes. We moved to WordPress, which gave us so many more options (plugins) to create a manageable user interface and to train our volunteers to work within the website and keep things organized and updated. We're very happy we switched even with the initial cost of transitioning.

Pros

  • Options for many languages
  • Options for developers
  • It's open-source

Cons

  • Not user-friendly
  • No central support
  • Not compatible with many of our plugins
  • Good themes cost money
  • Need lots of support from developers

Return on Investment

  • Lost trust with our community members because they couldn't navigate the website
  • Had to purchase separate software for other tasks and they didn't integrate well
  • Negatively impacted our marketing efforts because we didn't have a clean site to send leads to

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Wix, Squarespace, WordPress and Elementor

Other Software Used

WordPress, Wix, Xpro Elementor Theme Builder

Great for web developers learning curve for content editors

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

building out new stories on a corporate newsroom, creating new pages for audiences to learn more about the business, creating a press center for media to download relevant assets, publishing press releases, publishing external facing business updates, hosting an about us page, etc.

Pros

  • developer tools
  • secure CMS
  • simple web design

Cons

  • needs a more intuitive user interface
  • simpler taxonomy and nomenclature for broader audiences
  • more dynamic design options

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Wix and Blogger