Drupal Room for Improvement

it_user635487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Developer, Sr at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Drupal could always have more developers. However, with recent announcements for backwards compatibility in the future, we are hoping to be able to leverage Drupal in the future, too.

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it_user253797 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant, Business Owner, Lecturer at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

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!

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it_user621027 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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IK
Consultant at sterlingIQ

The price could be adjusted. For the client, it's very expensive. if they could make an enterprise equivalent of Acquia which is somewhat cheaper, that would be very helpful.

Scalability would be another item that needs to be improved. We would love to see some form of enterprise scalability.

The user experience in designing layouts should be much easier or much more helpful.

The user interface needs some improvement. The solution should mirror WordPress in that WordPress offers a lot of end-user usability functionality. We would love to see that implemented in Drupal.

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it_user677715 - PeerSpot reviewer
Drupal Lead Developer at a marketing services firm with 201-500 employees

The UI can, probably, be improved as well as the documentation.

For the UI, as WordPress is the biggest challenger of Drupal, we can observe some sort of lacking in that domain, even though it has been largely improved over time. Although, what we have tried to do, is always to create the best UI for contribution and most of the times, the way that the fields are displayed have so much logic behind them, that there is no need for any training. That's one of our primary goals and what satisfies me in the end, is when we deliver to the client.

As it's an open-source project, sometimes it's hard to find any documentation; although it has been improved over time as well. For instance, Symfony on which Drupal 8 is based, has very good documentation. Sometimes, you just have to read the code to understand how it works or how to use an API, which is not the best way to learn for everyone.

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it_user674082 - PeerSpot reviewer
Drupal Architect with 201-500 employees

The current version represents a new architecture for the product: Object-oriented sitting atop Symfony 2, rather than procedural.

The kinks are still being worked out, so there is an opportunity to improve on the current state of most of it. APIs are improved, and the originals were deprecated but were left in place. Features that weren't ready for release are completed and added, such as media handling, due in 8.3.

New features that are being considered are added as experimental modules: They come disabled, but can be enabled by the admin.

Drupal, like the Enterprise, birthed new versions from the ashes of the old. Starting with D8, it improves as it journeys.

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it_user628050 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Drupal developer at a non-profit with 51-200 employees

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.

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it_user664716 - PeerSpot reviewer
Freelance Drupal Front End Developer at Marc Martinez at a tech vendor

This depends on whether Drupal wants to become user-friendlier toward non-developers. The GUI is still not as intuitive as WordPress. This is not an issue if you are comfortable with coding in PHP, JavaScript, CSS3, HTML 5, and have a basic understanding of Object Oriented Programming.

Migration of Drupal 7-based modules to Drupal 8 is still lagging behind. Many of your favorite D7 modules may not be completely migrated to a D8 format. On the plus side, the Drupal community is working hard to migrate D7-based modules to D8.

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it_user637827 - PeerSpot reviewer
Drupal Backend Developer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

I think Drupal has to improve the UX for some administrative pages, such as the modules list page.

When I talk about improvements in user experience of the administration page, specifically in the modules list page, I mean that this page is annoying. It is annoying because the default interface gives us a list of all the modules in the site, uncategorized, and without the possibility to filter by text and to complete the activation of one specific module. Instead, we have to scroll down the whole page.

This is a problem because in live sites, the average number of installed modules is around 30 for mid-complex sites.

A module filter would resolve this problem. It would improve the Drupal modules interface, but an optimal solution would be to add UX improvements to the Drupal core.

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it_user622752 - PeerSpot reviewer
Expert Drupal, SEO at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

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.

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it_user666759 - PeerSpot reviewer
Drupal Web Developer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees

I liked the configuration being more database oriented. The file-based configuration is nicer for deployment and makes it quicker. However, the other 99% of the time, it's a pain in the butt.

They drew the line between what is "config" and what is "content". What is config is file passed, is exported, pushed to the server and imported as configuration.

This make a large deployment much easier, quicker and cleaner. However, when you want to add a permission to a user role, something as simple as that checkbox, forces a config push, which annoys me.

At a certain point that takes away from what a CMS should be. I get the
file based for some basic config storage, but at a certain point it really
gets in the way of productivity.

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it_user249003 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at Appnovation Technologies

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.

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MV
Web Developer / Programmer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

It has to improve the speed of the admin section. Sometimes you will get stuck while updating the configurations, especially because it uses AJAX in the interface.

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it_user667677 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Drupal Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • Admin Interface: You'll often hear that Drupal has a pretty high learning curve. I attribute that to its admin interface. New users can find it pretty difficult to understand. It's rarely intuitive and lacks hints/suggestions.
  • Example Content: Drupal doesn't come with any default content. When you set up and start using Drupal, you'll find that it's pretty empty. With the addition of the example content (preferably with guides/tours), it would be possible to make Drupal easier to understand.
  • Lack of good and ready-to-use themes: Drupal.org provides thousands of themes, but most of the time, they are not ready-to-use. Most of these themes are what we call "base themes", i.e., you need to extend (using sub-themes) or modify (in code) to get exactly what you need.
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it_user626082 - PeerSpot reviewer
Web Developer at Themelize.me

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.

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it_user77997 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager of IT with 1,001-5,000 employees
Migration from one major version to the next major version requires significant effort. View full review »
it_user77997 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager of IT with 1,001-5,000 employees
  1. There are not enough Drupal developers to satisfy demand.
  2. Upgrading to new major versions has historically been complex and difficult. Hopefully the migration functionality being built for Drupal 8 will ease this work.
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it_user669366 - PeerSpot reviewer
Drupal Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

There is need for better organization of the documentation on the drupal.org site.

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it_user627033 - PeerSpot reviewer
Web Developer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

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

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it_user627042 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Development at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It needs a better UI for the back-end user.

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it_user90792 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer with 51-200 employees
As with most if not all web technologies, theres always an initial learning curve that can seem daunting. These days however there are excellent online resources such as buildamodule.com that provides video training for Drupal which can be a lot easier to digest than reading documentation sometimes. That being said, there is some great documentation over at Drupal.org that would be a must-read for anyone considering Drupal for their next project. View full review »
AE
Drupal Solutions Architect at a non-tech company

The classic open source pain points, such as documentation and many charlatan developers, need improvement.

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it_user677691 - PeerSpot reviewer
Drupal Web Developer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

I am not able to answer this question in a few or a lot of words.

Drupal is a system compromised of a lot of modules.There is always room for improvement. The thing is though, that especially since Drupal 8, this is the only thing that it will be doing.

While Drupal had differences between major versions and modules had to be ported in order to function etc, since Drupal 8, there will only be normal upgrades by deprecating methods while introducing new features.

Drupal is now on a constant release flow that will target to only improve.
The community itself has improved quite a lot as well in terms of numbers and quality of code.

I am not saying that Drupal is perfect, it is far from perfect, but the community as an open source organization is improving constantly. Even the front end development of Drupal which was always a weak point, has improved greatly in Drupal 8 using the twig system to easily create templates.

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it_user627036 - PeerSpot reviewer
Drupal Developer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

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

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it_user243900 - PeerSpot reviewer
Web Administrator at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

- Drupal Community and Forums not as easy and straightforward as Wordpress

- The number of areas covered by existing plugins should be larger

- Resource Hungry, compared to Wordpress

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it_user798423 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at FFW

It is a little bit simplified.

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it_user982032 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I would like to see better pricing because Drupal is an open-source technology. And then I also think the support needs to improve, as well as the integration with tracking and analytics systems. Translation management should also improve.

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it_user330165 - PeerSpot reviewer
Online Websites Advertising at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees
  • It needs a shorter learning curve.
  • It needs to improve resources usage.
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it_user526989 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Officer at a non-profit with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user685365 - PeerSpot reviewer
Drupal Developer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Since Drupal is not developed for any specific use cases, it has some learning curve and requires effort to learn. Thus, there is a need for good documentation.

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it_user674079 - PeerSpot reviewer
PHP/Drupal developer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

It requires a lot of server resources. It should be optimized.

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it_user607074 - PeerSpot reviewer
Web Application Developer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user674055 - PeerSpot reviewer
Drupal developer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Developing more profiles easily and fast would really help. With the minimum profile functionalities, there is a need for supported functions like commerce or a new website.

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it_user669345 - PeerSpot reviewer
Drupal Developer at a media company with 201-500 employees

The documentation needs improvement.

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it_user104652 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

Modifying the themes (colors, dimensions, and pictures) could be easier.

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it_user543960 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Overall business friendliness of the product: Digital experience features like target segmentation and campaign management have a long way to go.

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