Drupal Review

Drupal is an open source content management system which provides an easy installation process, a good range of modules for features' expansion, as well as a supportive community that will help resolve issues that you face with Drupal.

We have been using Drupal for more than 7 years now. Through my different companies we have developed many Drupal sites, from simple ones to complex E-commerce sites and custom made applications.

Drupal 7.x if combined with the appropriate modules and cache mechanisms can provide a robust, fully featured and secure website with endless capabilities. However, for these optimizations to be made, a Drupal expert may be required. It is not as easy to use as Wordpress for example - although Drupal 7.x is vastly improved to Drupal 6.x and Drupal 8.x will be even better.

We have also tried Wordpress and Joomla in various occasions, and while Wordpress is our choice for simple projects, Drupal is always our cost-effective choice for complex projects. It provides flexibility, robust framework, excellent modules for easy expansion and a very good support community.

One of the things that Drupal needs to improve is the interface. It needs to become more user friendly. It is not as rich in terms of modules as Wordpress is, but it is getting there.

If you have a high traffic site and speed is important, to optimize Drupal you will probably need an expert. 

In regards to the interface it needs to become more user friendly like for example Wordpress or Joomla, so that simple users can administer the site in an easy way and not get lost in menus and options that they don’t understand that may even break the site. Although the interface has improved in comparison to Drupal 6, there are still many things to be done.

The number of modules that Drupal has although adequate, is not nearly as good as the number of modules that Wordpress has. There are times that you cannot find a functionality in Drupal while you can find plenty of options in Wordpress. For example Drupal integration with mailers, the only reliable plugin is for Mailchimp. So if you want to integrate with another platform like Aweber, emma, getresponse etc, you have almost zero choices. While most of the platforms integrate perfectly with Wordpress.

Optimizing Drupal as a high performance site, is not an easy task. You have many options but the most effective ones require server and settings’ modifications, which can be done by experts. However once you have the proper setup, Drupal flies!