Drupal. Drupal? Drupal!

For development of web sites and applications is our company Syntactic Sugar using open source Drupal. This system was chosen after a long selection process, and especially after gaining experiences from different systems in the implementation of web projects. Drupal has many advantages.

Advantages of Drupal

• Ubiquity - Drupal belongs to the so-called Big Three of the most used content management systems (CMS), together with Joomla and WordPress. The exact order is not important and depends on specific criteria, but it is interesting that other content management systems have a significant gap in this triad, which is further widening.
• Open Source - Drupal is developed under GPL 2, i.e. its also for commercial use and is completely free.
• Community support - the development of the Drupal community is large. Drupal.org server has more than 830,000 accounts, of which more than 2000 developers. Each year, holds two meetings dedicated to the global Drupal - meeting in San Francisco in April 2010 registered more than 3000 visitors. Drupal interface is translated to 44 languages.
• Rich functionality - Drupal supports the widespread emergence of more and more functions. Eg. Server Drupal Modules contains more than 5200 modules = functions that are free and ready to be used use on your website. Of course, development and expansion of specific functionalities is also supported.
• Flexibility - in my opinion, this property is one of the main reasons for such popularity and extension of Drupal. In Drupal is no problem to react flexibly to customer requirements. Do you want a practical example? One of our customers came to us with the following requirements: "I don’t want my posts on the main page of Web site to be managed by the administrator. I want to allow to each registered user to write posts. These contributions, however, will normally show only on their special page. Our editor can see all contributions. Once he selects and approves one of the contributions, the article will automatically appear on the main page. I want to send e-mail with the assessment of the author and editor every time one of the articles has been evaluated. Rating is not only for articles but also for photos in galleries." In short - none of it was very difficult, but difficult was to find content management system that supported all this. Development of these functions is possible but very expensive. Drupal is really flexible, so we were able to configure all of the requirements (!) In the administration interface.
• Prepared solutions - Drupal makes a perfect base for more specialized systems and initiatives. There are such distributions as Acquia Drupal, which already includes the most common favorite modules along with other enhancements, Open Atrium is the perfect base for corporate intranets,Ubercart for e-commerce etc.
• Other - there are of course many other benefits resulting from the prevalence of the aforementioned. For Drupal this provides many ready-made graphical themes. The problem is to find a dedicated hosting (sufficient and regular combination of Apache, PHP, MySQL), programmers and consultants. Drupal had been assessed thousands of users who sorted all kinds of minor and greater complications. You will probably not find something you will be unpleasantly surprised about.

However, Drupal also has its drawbacks.

Disadvantages of Drupal

• The philosophy of the system - Drupal disadvantages stem primarily from its focus and the way we work with it. One would say that it is rather a property, but it is hard to explain this to the customer, who perceives it as a disadvantage.
• Steep learning curve - Drupal is a system which can come in and start working immediately. Firstly, it requires understanding of at least some basic rules. Then it's all about speed. This certainly applies to system administrators and programmers, to editors – even a suitable administration interface can help a lot.
• Rapid development of new features - even-though the rapid development of Drupal is definitely an advantage, in terms of system administrators who should respond to published hotfixes and new versions, these changes represents additional work.

In conclusion

We have implemented Drupal in a number of smaller sites and several major portals - for example Peloton.cz or Skinet.cz, which offer dozens of features and have high attendance. Long-term experience shows that Drupal is a good choice for companies developing Web applications, but also for our customers – end users.