I'm looking for reviews on using Drupal CMS for a small community site
To all,
I'm looking for reviews on using Drupal CMS for a small community site. I've looked at several CMS packages, and have narrowed my options to using Drupal. Just wanted to see what others think of it.
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Michael
www.linkedin.com/in/michaelzampino
Good Answers (1)
Nik L
Drupal Web Architect & Owner, Kineta Systems
Best Answers in: Starting Up (1), Web Development (1)
Michael, I'm a Drupal developer myself. I've used it for four projects to date. Some of this has been hard work, as Drupal is so flexible there's often several ways to do one thing, which can be initially confusing. There can be a fairly steep learning curve to using this system. That said, I spent 18 months trialling every open source CMS I could find, and Drupal wins out for me.
The reasons I have stuck with Drupal are:
- features: you can do pretty much anything with it, including e-commerce, forums, blogs etc with seamless integration of membership throughout.
- flexibility: the whole system is based on a series of APIs (this is truer still starting with v6, as yet officially unavailable). The APIs give developers huge control, with database abstraction, form/menu/link processing, a comprehensive permissions system (GUI configured), and more.
- availability: an enormous set of contributed modules. The sheer number of available modules for Drupal is staggering. Knowing which ones to use for any given task requires a somewhat encyclopaedic knowledge. That said, this availability often results in a greatly reduced development time. I can't count the number of times I've sat thinking "how do I do that...?" and someone else pipes up, "just use module X!" Plenty of smiles to be had from that!
- beauty: Drupal websites can be as pretty as you want them to be. The Theme system allows near-as-dammit absolute control of display of site elements. You can override all the default CSS, control all your HTML rendering down to an atomic level, override form displays (very powerful feature), provide your own variables to page templates etc. This is an amazing set of features which I have yet to see elsewhere at this level. The Drupal 6 version of this system is leaps ahead of this, with even more flexibility.
- traffic: core Drupal modules offer great control over content. With additional modules, any SEO expert would be pretty much stuck for a way to complain! Drupal sites fare very well in search engines anyway, but with some clever additions one can really boost search engine rankings. Having some SEO training myself, I know that there's really little else you can do to improve your SEO that you can't do with a well built Drupal site.
- support: a security team checks core code, modules and even contributed modules for loopholes, and issues warnings promptly. This is an important area to consider for future-proofing your site. On the main Drupal site (http://www.drupal.org), there are support forums, as well as a dedicated issues queue for each and every module. This means that there is a specific place to report bugs and check for known bugs, as well as centralising issues for each module, making developers lives much easier. All these things are held together by the fact that the Drupal community is almost unique. Of all the forums, websites etc that I have known and interacted with over the years, this one astounds me still. Drupal users and developers are for the most part working in more of a "family" environment than anything. This is exemplified on the IRC channels available (see below), where support is really quite impressive. I spend a lot of time helping there and am genuinely impressed with how helpful other people are.
All in all, I rate this system highly, not just for its features, but also for its intangible qualities. Other people who agree with me? IBM, Yahoo!, NASA, Warner, Greenpeace, Amnesty, Ecademy, and the list goes on.
Links:
IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net - #drupal, #drupal-support, #drupal-consultants
Sites: http://www.drupal.org , http://groups.drupal.org , http://planet.drupal.org
Modules: http://drupal.org/project/modules
IBM articles: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/osource/implement.html?S_TACT=105AGX46&S_CMP=LP
Dev Book: http://www.drupalbook.com
Hope this information helps.
Regards,
Nik
http://www.kinetasystems.com - Drupal design & development in Nottingham
More Answers (20)
If you search the skill share over at cssbeauty I'm positive you would find some reviews of this open source software. Also Drupal itself may have a community forum but that may be somewhat bias towards positive feedback on drupal
Links:
Brian W
Technical Consultant
Best Answers in: Government Policy (1), Change Management (1), Computers and Software (1)
I just started using Drupal to build my new site and love it. I can't say I am an expert with it yet but so far it has been quite good. The best part seems to be its functionality - Drupal can be made to manage any site with any sort of content. Blogs, forums, podcasts, RSS feeds, everything.
I am finding that another great feature is the Drupal community. Because so many people use it, there is a very strong user support system at Drupal.org Most of the problems you will run into have already been solved and the community is very friendly towards helping out newcomers.
Links:
I have also developed my Project website usind Drupal (with backend assistance)...it has it's quirks but nothing unusual for an opensource product
Links:
Clarification added December 7, 2007:
Further details include it took about 8-9 months to get it completely functional (running parrallel web sites until stability reached with Drupal), and have been running live for well over 1 1/2 years; we run a development & production site. Also, it works best with a Unix server vs. IIS -- and there are MANY security patches and various upgrades, so there is definitely time involved in just daily maintenance (assuming you install all patches and upgrade all associated programs).
Ashok D
COO & Jt. Managing Director, Envision Network Technologies Pvt Ltd
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Michael,
Drupal is very good. We have used it and are extremely happy.
Thanks,
Ashok
ashok@entl.net
Frank M
Professional IT Software Architect. LION|TopLinked|Invites Wecolme|15K+
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Hello Michael,
I have tried using Drupal. It is fairly easy to install and use. You will be able to find manuals and other related documentation that are up-to-date. It is also fairly rich on functionality without being over complicated.
My recommendation would be to go for version 5.5 if you are going live in the near future otherwise I would go for version 6 (beta 4 is just released).
I was fairly impressed that Drupal had a translation in Danish. After all there are only 5,4 mill Danes.
In terms of review I would visit CMS Matrix (see link below) and look at the reviews and comments there. CMS Matrix also gives a comprehensive overview of the functionality of Drupal.
If you have any questions then I'll be happy to help you further.
Best Regards,
Frank Mandix
frankmandix@gmail.com
Links:
Henk-Jan V
Engagement manager, insurance & project management consultant, seasoned editor & blogger
Best Answers in: Web Development (2), Project Management (1), Blogging (1)
Hey Michael,
Just to give you a hint of Drupal's potential to serve large & small communities. Capgemini's internal knowledge management 'system' has been revamped into KM 2.0 just a couple of months ago, and it is powered by Drupal.
A couple of other Drupal instances to serve Flash developers, offer AIR application and share an online portfolio of products & services can be found at my friend Folkert Hielema's domains, some of them mentioned below.
Links:
Hi Michael,
I've become quite fond of Drupal, and I think it is an ideal platform for developing a community site. It accommodates a wide range of administration skills- you can set it up fairly easily and get online fast with one of many available themes, or you can dig in and customize until the cows come home.
I would also echo the point that Drupal has a great support community- that makes all the difference when you are learning.
One recommendation I would make is to implement Drupal on a dedicated server- where the MySQL database is on the same machine. Drupal makes a lot of queries to the database, and shared hosting has a tendency to slow down page access.
Good luck to you!
Dave Vogler
Barry H
Program Director at Social Media Club Seattle
Best Answers in: Blogging (1), Web Development (1)
I've had success in building community sites with Drupal, but depending on the size and features of the site it may not be what is needed. It is not the easiest platform to develop in and the various projects contributed by the community are often very wide spread in terms of quality.
Depending on budget, there are a wide variety of platforms that are more reasonable. Feel free to drop me an e-mail, looking at social platforms is what I do. barry.hurd@socialmediasystems.com
Matt G
Community Builder in Austin, Texas. Founder of door64.com and Brainshower Consulting. Experienced Verification Engineer.
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Michael,
I am currently using Drupal for a community of high-tech professionals in Central Texas. Works fantastically. As Dave mentioned, it can be somewhat database intensive, so a dedicated solution (with co-located mysql database) may be optimal when traffic gets moderate to heavy.
So far, I've not seen anything more usable and extensible than Drupal.
Cheers,
Matt
--
Links:
Andreas G
Sales Manager Europe at Kineo CAM
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I have no idea about Drupal. But I know that Barnraiser at http://www.barnraiser.org is creating free, open source software with the target of serving social networks. Emphasis on "social". Depending on what you mean by "community site", this may be another candidate you may not know.
Links:
Drupal is worth using and we do for several of our sites but if it is a simple site there are some other good but less complicated packages.
In the 7 years or so that I have run my community based website, I have tried various open source CMS systems - starting with Postnuke, then Mambo, Joomla, and finally Wordpress "bent" into a CMS.
I wasn't happy with them for various reasons, the most common being the organization of large amounts of content. I now have another requirement on my systems - integration with vBulletin forums.
Drupal - or in my case vbDrupal, a fork designed to hook seamlessly into vBulletin - has been very good. Several years ago I had tried it out and was frustrated with the back end management and the plainness of the system. Drupal is not so much a CMS, as a tool to build a CMS. Instead of writing code, however, you're assembling whatever 3rd party plugins that you need from Drupal.org.
There is a bit of a learning curve, but I have yet to run into a problem that has not been solved by someone else, or functionality that has not made it's way into a plugin.
Additionally, the Drupal code, as well as several 3rd party plugins (all free, mind you) is excellent for SEO. Short URL's, dynamic META tags, etc. It's all there.
The hard work you put into setting up a Drupal site will be rewarded by the almost limitless freedom you get from using it. I hate to sound like such a fanboy, but after working with it for a while, I've grown to really appreciate how powerful a tool it really is.
Links:
Michael,
Drupal provides a great framework for web development, content publishing, and group management. Non technical users tend to have difficulty enabling and configuring the system, but once a tech savvy person gets the ball rolling the system can grow and adapt to your community. The setup and configuration can be a sizable endeavor to do right the first time so be sure to spend plenty of time in the pre-planning stage to ensure you don't get ahead of yourself.
Your technical background certainly sounds sufficient to deploy and configure the software and Drupal has been used on several large scale high traffic sites so if your small community grows your only limitations are likely to come from how you design the architecture. A less experienced individual should be prepared for a lot of work to install and configure the Drupal. With so many choices on how to configure Drupal for content management, you can run into a 'paralysis by analysis' situation. If you make shortcut decisions early they will follow you through the lifecycle of your site. Once you get past that and have a stable foundation, it's simple and easy to keep things moving.
Although some systems, like Joomla, may allow for more rapid deployment, (one click installations, huge libraries of extensions, components, etc) the limitations in a tool like Joomla are likely to be frustrating for a user at your level. One issue to be aware of with Drupal is that as it is under very active development, things are changing. Drupal has seen numerous releases over the last few years which can be good (problems solved) but also bad (new problems to solve.) If you have time to keep up with the changes, you should be fine. If not, you might want to consider the trade off of a more stable framework.
The link below does a quick 'compare / contrast' of Joomla and Drupal, providing a great general overview of both in the process.
Best of luck,
George Faerber
Links:
It depends on what you have to do, for example I prefer Wordpress, I like it because it's easy to use and to extend. But maybe it's not the best to manage communieties... at the begging Wordpress was a blogging engine now it's look like a CMS.
Let's read this article it's not so updated but it's good: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource1/
I recommend Drupal not only for small community sites, Drupal is great for big social networks (popsugar.com is running on Drupal), for corporate sites (Mozilla.org) and for blogs (way better than Wordpress, but needs some tune up). It has most active community in Internet and you can be sure, that this framework will evolve. If you need some assistance with Drupal, just contact me, i'll be glad to help.
Patrick V
IToutsourcingAsia.com - PHP & .NET Web/Software Development from Nepal - Magento - Joomla, ...
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Hi Michael,
We also can help you out with Drupal but I personally believe that the admin of Joomla is more user friendly so will benefit you more.
Have a nice day,
Patrick
Patrick Van Dun
Managing Director
IT Outsourcing Asia Pvt. Ltd.
www.IToutsourcingAsia.com
Skype name: itoffshore
Links:
Michael,
I've used Drupal for several sites and find it very useful. However, it is not for the casual user/developer, particularly for community sites. Drupal really falls down when it comes to forums. You CAN replicate standard forum functionality. However, it is not a simple module install. You have to plug-in and configure a lot of individual sub-components.
That approach provides maximum flexibility, but makes forum setup unnecessarily arcane for those unfamiliar with Drupal. The learning curve can be pretty high and the community, while active, can be somewhat difficult to penetrate for quick support. Expect a lot of RTFM comments, albiet very polite ones. ;)
With those concerns noted, I really like Drupal. You simply need to understand what you are getting into. It is not super simple like WordPress, but then WordPress is built to blog, not run communities.
I also like the direction Drupal is headed. They fixed theming a lot with 5.0 and are taking additional steps to simplify the user experience with 6.0 and the road map beyond. I expect the forums to be addressed in the 7.0 release, but know that this is well over a year away.
Regards,
Doug
Links:
Nik N
Programmer
Best Answers in: Internationalization and Localization (1), Professional Networking (1), Software Development (1)
I have used Drupal both for personal and business purposes, and I can say that it rocks: It's well-maintained, well-documented, easy to learn, easy to customise, and decently secure. There is simply no other choice in CMSes, definitely go with Drupal.
I've tried many CMS solutions (including Joomla, MamboCMS, ...) but Drupal is in my opinion the best.
Very powerfull, has modules for just about anything you need, easily customizable, etc...
I'm currently running 3 sites (professional & personal) on Drupal & 1 on Joomla. The Joomla one was created before I started using Drupal and will be redone using Drupal in the near future.
Drupal is a good choice.
Sanjay Aggarwal
