Drupal Reviews

The best things about Drupal are its extensibility and plug-ability. You can get something going quite fast that’s feasible for clients to see.

It has a very good authentication/authorization system. For a few years, the application had a dedicated security team who took care of reported security issues with the Drupal core and even contributed modules. The vast user base is a big bonus. You have plenty people collaborating on many modules/plugins, so if you have issues, someone will step in quite fast to help you.

A lot of functionality has been added to the core since Drupal Version 6 allows for people who don’t have a strong technical background to build complex displays of data and pages just by using a WYSIWYG editor.

We have rebuilt a few websites in Drupal. Due to the way Drupal is built, it usually allows us to have new functionality ready in a sprint, where before it could take several months to get into production.

The learning curve is the thing that scares most people away from using Drupal. With Drupal Version 8, it has taken a more standardized way by teaming up with the Symfony framework.

This, however, is a double-edged sword. It takes you a step further away from the typical front-end developers that had found their gem in Drupal Versions 6 and 7. By its procedural nature, they were able to build semi-complex websites without any real programming and object oriented programming knowledge.

Everything below Drupal 8 was aimed at being a procedural application where you can make changes by using hooks they provide in their code (a small amount were Object Oriented, but most people would never touch this). This allows for an easy way to modify existing pages for the non-programmers who know how to write scripts a little. But these hooks are very specific to Drupal itself (hence the steep learning curve) and aren’t very intuitive if you look at PHP frameworks/applications as a whole. The documentation on how to do things as a complete novice is only subpar in both Drupal 7 & 8. By now there are plenty how-to tutorials on how to do things in Drupal 7 luckily.

With Drupal 8 they decided to use Symphony2 as the base framework for the system. This allows for best practices in that framework to be used and allow the vast community of symphony2 programmers to make a switch to Drupal since it leans closer to home than the procedural approach from the previous version. Almost everything is now Object Oriented and the amount of hooks (the old procedural approach) has been pushed back to a minimum. This makes it more difficult for the previously mentioned non-programmers. They are now looking at a huge time-investment to learn OO Programming to get started in Drupal 8. I believe this is the reason why Drupal 8 is making such a slow start compared to Drupal 6 & 7. It’s a good product but they made it so much harder for the people who can write basic PHP scripts.

The main area of improvement would be better/more documentation and tutorials on how to do things in Drupal 8 at this moment. It’s a leap of faith for the non-programmers out there and some of them just completely thrown off by it. This is what incites projects like https://backdropcms.org/ where they fork Drupal 7 to keep it going after it reaches EOL.

I’ve been a Drupal developer for eight years. Drupal Version 6 is what I used when I first started with Drupal development. For legacy reasons, I still actively develop some applications in this version. I have used Drupal Version 7 for five years and it is still the most used to date. I have used Drupal Version 8 only for a year, but for nothing overly complex yet.

I haven’t had any real stability issues.

When we built an application reaching 200k unique hits, we were suffering from severe slowness. We had to change our approach to caching and the use of a load-balanced setup.

We made a load-balanced setup consisting of four nodes and added a Varnish and Memcache dedicated instance per node.

This allowed us to have a response time of less than a second, even with 200k unique hits per hour.

As mentioned before, the real strength of Drupal is the vast community who the product really relies on.

You will have to learn most things yourself, but if you have any questions, most of the community members are willing to help you with your problems.

We have used many different systems before, ranging from TYPO3, Umbraco, and even a custom CMS. The reasons to change to Drupal were:

• Ease of deployment
• One-sprint releases
• Security
• Out-of-the-box support for a good load-balanced solution
• No stale cache problems

The basic setup of Drupal is easy and straightforward. The learning curve to make complex changes or modules is quite steep in Drupal. This learning curve is even steeper in Drupal Version 8 than it was in Drupal Versions 6 and 7.

They use a specific set of hooks to process your code in the application that takes some time to get used to.

The product itself is free and open source, as well as the contributed modules available on the main website. You have a lot of possibility at hand, free of charge.

We tried a few alternatives, such as Umbraco, TYPO3, and WordPress.

While the learning curve is steep and may seem scary, if you invest time in it, it is well worth it.

It may be a good idea to invest in training and/or literature about development in Drupal. It will teach your best practices and will shorten the learning curve.

I think they are on the right track though. They listen to the community about a lot of things and they try to improve the application itself and the modules by giving coding and security feedback/guidelines.

Drupal Version 7 is mature and will not change. Out-of-the-box, it’s still incomplete as a full-blown CMS.

There is no easy way of building structured pages and a general how-to flow.

All these features have been made available by community-contributed modules afterwards. This makes it a great product, but you depend on a third party’s time and money.

Luckily, they have taken feedback from this version and funneled it in the next version.

I haven’t done enough large-scale projects in Drupal Version 8.

So far, it’s a great product, but the configuration management makes it difficult to work on a single project with multiple developers.

• Content type definitions: One of the best features of Drupal, and maybe the key differentiator to other solutions, is the way that content is structured and managed. In Drupal Version 8, this was improved. The global process of creating a content type with fields, relations, and translations is more refined and advanced than before.
• Views: In the Drupal Core, views are a quick and advanced way to create listings of content. When using the UI, it is possible to query contents and have the results sorted and filtered by any element. Combined with the template engine, the output can be easily transformed into whatever is required from the design.
• Inclusion of symphony framework: Drupal Version 8 shifted to a full OOP API. The inclusion of pieces from the symphony framework provided some modern patterns in the Drupal core.
• Configuration management: A CMI was implemented for Drupal Version 8, a centralized place to handle and store configurations. This is a huge improvement when compared to Drupal Version 7.
• Content moderation: This wasn’t included in the original 8 version but was incorporated later as an experimental module and will be released as stable on Drupal 8.3. The possibility to have custom workflow around the contents and different states (e.g. draft, published, pending, etc..) is critical for any medium/big website.

My organization sells services around Drupal Version 8.

The admin interface could be improved. Compared to Version 7, it was a huge improvement. I think it is not enough for current user needs. Creating complex content types (involving translations), is still a very slow and painful process.

I believe that a new admin interface that stands up with modern UI patterns is critical. A good example is what WordPress did by replacing the old admin interface with a JavaScript based one.

All API functionality is covered by the documentation, but in most cases, it is very limited and lacks good examples. Mostly, it is required to debug into the core of the CMS to understand how to solve some more complex issues.

Drupal 8 lacks a media manager where all assets like pictures, videos, and other media files, can be managed. This is present on other solutions and is a core need for any CMS. There are some contributed solutions but they are unstable or do not meet all the required functionalities. In such case the community is aware and the media initiative (https://www.drupalmedia.org) is in progress with the promise to solve that soon in next updates of Drupal.

I've been using the solution for six months.

Drupal Version 8 is a more or less mature product, since it was launched more than one year ago.

However, when combined with custom implementations and contributed modules, some things seem not stable. Being an open source solution with a large community, it is easy to find a patch or a workaround. However, this requires some knowledge.

Scalability is something that can be related to many factors, depending on your needs and the budget you have. It is also related to the way you architect your solution and therefore how you implement your Drupal website. A bad architecture, in terms of content, can drastically reduce it.

Drupal Version 8 is based on a typical PHP + MySQL/MariaDB + Apache/NGiNX stack. These have been in the market for some time. They are hosting providers who are selling Drupal cloud services with promises of scalability.

Drupal version 8 is an open source solution, so the support is focused on the Drupal community itself.

In most cases, help is present in the form of forums, discussion groups, chats, etc. However, when entering enterprise grade, it is recommended to obtain support from a Drupal specialized company.

There are several available in the market. Some include people who are involved in maintaining the core of Drupal.

I worked in the past with different CMS solutions. Perhaps Vignette was the most relevant. I believe, at that time, it was the most complete and advanced CMS. However, It faced the same issues as many other solutions. It was heavy, lacking in flexibility, and slow to adopt new tech trends.

Drupal is the opposite, since it is not closed software and it does not rely on only one company.

The Drupal Version 8 setup is pretty straightforward. You can do it on the cloud without any technical knowledge or you can do it on your local environment.

To test on the local environment I recommend using:

• Docker (https://www.docker.com) by using Drupal customised containers (https://github.com/wodby/docker4drupal)
• Kalabox (http://www.kalabox.io) - Docker based but with nice UI.

• DrupalVM (https://www.drupalvm.com)

For a quick test, you can use https://simplytest.me. (You can virtually test any version and most of the main modules.)

There is no cost regarding licensing. Costs should be calculated based on the required support and training efforts.

I started with Drupal in 2009. I was working with Vignette and investigated other open source solutions, such as WordPress, Joomla!, and TYPO3.

First invest in internal knowledge and your way to handle strategic decisions, and then find a good provider/partner who can support you when you need it.

Free your mind from other concepts that may be related. This is mostly relevant for people who are quite accustomed to SharePoint and/or other commercial solutions. This is a shift in the paradigm. Embracing Drupal while trying to achieve similar results as these other solutions will never work.

• The most valuable features are flexibility, robustness, and community support.
• Has a very customizable web platform. You can build a lot of different solutions on top of it.
• It is robust, secure, and maintained by a very large community of developers.
• Community: The most important feature. The Drupal community is awesome and will provide you with all the support, training, and answers you might need when using it.

It allows your web site or web application to grow along with your business. You don’t have to rebuild your technical solution every time your business changes. You can just extend its functionality.

They can improve their migration tools and processes. Migrating from one version to another can be very complex.

I have been using Drupal for more than five years.

We had some stability issues. Some modules are not production-ready. This is the case specifically with the most recent version of Drupal.

If custom development follows the best practices and standards, it shouldn’t be any problem. However, when custom parts don’t follow the standards, there could be room for scalability problems.

Technical support is given by the community itself. It gets a rating of 4.5/5.

I’ve used WordPress as well. They are usually compared with each other. However, they are both good at solving different problems. You can achieve similar results, but they are better depending on your project.

WordPress is usually simpler and less expensive. It’s ideal for marketing websites, landing pages, blogs, and small e-commerce sites.

Drupal is better for larger and more enterprise-type sites. It can be expensive, but it provides more security and better scalability than WordPress.

The Drupal installation is simple. However, it is complex to start because you don’t get an out-of-the-box working website with all of what you need. You get a web platform with a lot of great tools and pieces to start building.

Drupal is an open source platform, so it doesn’t require any payment for the license.

I evaluated WordPress and I used it for several projects. I evaluated Joomla! and Magento.

Check if Drupal is the right tool for your project and business. Drupal projects can be expensive. Sometimes finding good developers is a hard task and the learning curve is very steep.

But it is worth it if you require an enterprise level web platform with great scalability, support, and security.

If you need a simpler website, and your budget is limited, it might be a good idea to check other tools like WordPress.

The most valuable are the security features and a wide array of available modules, or extensions, that can be used to add functionality to a Drupal website.

Our website, debugacademy.com, was built in Drupal. We use it to review student applications to our Drupal Development Course.

It needs better and more themes available for download, like you have in WordPress.

I have used this for 16 months.

We have not had any stability issues. Another good thing about Drupal is that it gets a lot of updates.

We have not had scalability issues. Drupal is designed for complex and large websites.

I would give technical support a rating of 5/5. The Drupal community is a very passionate and helpful one.

We did not have a previous solution.

The setup is definitely complex. In order to develop a Drupal website, you have to set up a local development environment or server.

Drupal is free to use since it is open source software. However, Drupal developers are expensive.

We didn’t look at any alternatives.

Make sure you know Drupal before getting into it. Take a Drupal course like the one we have.

• 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.