The CMS Report: Drupal Review
by Omar AlBadri on 10/15/2008 10:01:00 AM
This week I review Drupal 5.x
The CMS Report: Drupal Review
The goal of the CMS report is to help/inform developers on what CMS platform they should use for their projects. I started these article to help, warn and direct a user to chose the correct CMS for their perspective projects. Use these reviews as a guideline to see what potential advantages and downfalls you can get with each CMS i review.
This week I review and rate Drupal. Again the rating system is simple: 1 meaning this feature or item is poorly designed, implemented or overall useless and 10 meaning this feature/ item is about as perfect as you could want it.
Drupal 5.X
Overview: Drupal is, according to their site:" is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to set up scores of different kinds of web sites. Drupal is open source software licensed under the GPL, and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers."
What makes Drupal unique is the fact that everything is an object. What does that mean? In most CMS (and most frameworks) data is stored in a table column, so usually you will have a fixed number of "entries" you can provide for a specific object. In Drupal data is stored as nodes or as table rows. What this means is that Drupal in very extensible and complete custom content types are easily achieved. In fact Drupal is so extensible that sometimes it is difficult to understand how it works.
Some might ask why am I reviewing an older version of Drupal(6.x is out and 7.x is in development) ? This is because 5.x is considered the most stable Drupal version and it has the most modules available for it.(NOTE: I had some major issues trying to install 6.X.)
Lets begin the review remember 1 mean that the item or feature was poorly implemented and 10 means that item or feature is amazingly well though out or works really well, lets look at each item:
Installation: Average (5)
Overall: Drupal does not have an automatic installation so you are going to have to configure Drupal by updating the .inc files and creating a MySql database for it. After you get the everything configured and launch the application you are then prompted to install the database and download any updates.
Drawbacks: Feels a little outdated in the way that you have to do all the ground work yourself. A simple installation program would have been great for 5.x (one is available for 6.X). Also the installation is not hard as it is time consuming as you might have to ping you host to change some setting s or if you are installing it on a windows account, you have to install additional items to be able to run PHP on IIS. Although once you get pass the initial quirks Drupal rarely needs any more items installed and is usually extremely stable. Also if you are installing on IIS remember to remove the .htaccess file.
Learning Curve: Somewhat Hard(4)
Overall: The most difficult task when first running Drupal is not knowing what to do. Drupal is what I like to call "Industrial strength" in the fact that its hard to get. The problem is not in the fact that Drupal is hard to learn, but in the fact that Drupal has its own method of creating a CMS. Drupal is not difficult its more the difficult to understand the concepts it is trying to present. Its a change from a linear "Hand Code" ideal to a new "Object Orientated" module based system that is hard to learn. You just have to get it. I have had people try Drupal play with it for a day and say it is junk and move on to another CMS only to deliver the project 3 weeks late. I have had other Friends struggle through the learning phase get that "AHA!" movement and fall in love with Drupal. Drupal really needs time to grow on you. Its a departure from "code every line" to "let the framework do all the heavy lifting" approach. Once you get it though its very hard to use another CMS.
Drawbacks: Here the learning curve is the drawback. You are going to have some frustrating time not so much as learning Drupal but understanding hot powerfully it can be.
Extensibility: Amazing(10)
Overall: The best part of Drupal is all the free, Free, FREEE!! modules that you can get with it. Go to http://drupalmodules.com/module-finder just to see the amount of modules available for you. Need to add Polls and Quizzes to you site, no problem there is a quiz module. Friendly URLs? Easy as adding or turning on a module. Do the modules all have full source code, yes. Are the modules easy to install? Yes just add them to specific directory and enable them. Drupal greatest strength is in its free module development. Finally for those who love to hand code their pages, Drupal allows you to write native PHP code in a cms controlled page. While this is not the recommended way of doing it, if needed to be Drupal allows you to place code and use its function calls to get you site to work on the CMS controlled pages.
Drawbacks: Well there is this story . This highlights on of the problems with Open source is that the module might have some bugs. I see this as a acceptable trade off, even professionally made software has some bugs. Given the huge community support and the fact that many authors can contribute to a module, plus the fact that it is open source and you can fix the bug yourself, this is an acceptable albeit annoying trade off.
Documentation: Average(5)
Overall: Documentation in Drupal is mostly on-line and consist of user submitted forums and some on-line help. There are also some book written on Drupal that you should check out. The only reason that it gets a passing grade is the fact that the community is very active and also pretty helpful.
Drawbacks: The drawbacks are general, waiting of someone to answer your post, digging through the forums in hope of an answer. While the community is helpful they believe strongly in Drupal and at times are resistant to helping you solve a unique problem that the framework does not cover(such as listing out the contents of a database table on a page).
Overall: Excellent(9)
Despite its drawbacks and its steep learning curve, once you "get" Drupal there is no turning back. The way the system was designed is intelligent, the implementation makes sense, and once you figure out how Drupal works you can build very powerful web application in the fraction of the time as if you hand coded. When someone ask me about a CMS to use I always tell them to look at all the free modules and see if they can use the modules to build their site. Nine times out of 10 the free modules are enough. Now if they only could make a .NET version of Drupal...
Drupal can be downloaded from here
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If you want to set up a Drupal site in your local PC, or in a web hosting environment without Fantastico, you must install it yourself. Drupal has all the process quite simple, and we strongly recommend that you install it manually, and you have made since the Fantastico version of your web hosting provider may not be available for the latest.
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