Drupal 7.14

Using examples like Whitehouse, FedEx, SONY BMG is a huge stupidity.
If one needs the budget of these guys to be able to run Drupal, thenI advise anybody to run away of it.

I used Drupal for several years. It has pluses and minuses.

What Robert Fabian mentions about modules is effectively a bigger issue.
Other aspects like unflexible template or poor administration are also worth to mentionned.

Despite these bigger drawbacks I use it as I considered it more advanced in some areas as for example Joomla.

But today Joomla and Drupal are outdated. They have totally missed the innovation brought by the new generation of CMS.
And really, I don't think they will be able to overcome this.

I'm a more or less happy Durpal user. Used with care, Drupal can be a quick, easy, and reliable way to build interactive websites. Quick because most required functionality is available in the core as an add-in module. Easy (for users) because Drupal admits easy creation of new content types, and their viewing through attractive real-time queries. Reliable, assuming care is used in selection of modules and that you keep current with recommended releases. The end users, including user editors, see a friendly web face that "fits" how they think of the world.

An important word of caution: Limit yourself to modules that are being actively supported. And only add modules that you really need. It's just too easy to add modules that aren't really required, and that are not being actively supported. With that important restriction, Drupal does deliver on its promises.

Useful extra: Theming in Drupal is a challenge. I've found that Artisteer does a good first approximation of a desired theme. It ain't perfect and the resulting themes do need tweaking, but it's a very good way to get started. [I have no connection with the Artisteer people except as a user.]

The big challenge is continuing tech support. Drupal sites do need to be kept current with security releases. It's not rocket science, but it does go beyond what many users are equipped to undertake. My limited experience argues for a basic tech support budget of something like $100/month. And at that price there are SaaS solutions that can be considered, e.g. Wild Apricot for associations.

Bob Fabian

For us who prefer powerful to funny CMS then there is no comparison to Drupal. Today when I hire consultants, Drupal experience is a must have.

You can set up a photo gallery in less than 10 minutes in Drupal unless you are a total noob.

Becides Whitehouse there are tons of huge sites like Economist, SONY BMG, FedEx etc running on Drupal and more coming each day so it is hardly behind the curve.

It's all about taking some time to learn the system but once you do you will find Drupal the best CMS on the market, with no real competition except for very simple sites. As for security, it's good enough for Presidents and Prime Ministers. Just keep stuff updated and you are as secure as you can be.

Drupal is a piece of bloated heavy code. Administration is crap, template system is awful.
The core is very poor, it has to be said.
Hundreds of modules, yes, but you don't need most of them. And the few ones you might need, like a decent picture gallery, are low level.
A big drawback here is the lack of consistency in the module development that is not inline with the core development. This leads to security issues, lost of hacking, loss of time and big frustration for upgrading.
If you still find your way through all this, then you are still unsecured as very often developpers behind the modules just leave it there (no follow-up).
This is really a pain, and you are stuck with no other solution than to run for a paid developement.

At last, Drupal is now getting old. It needs more than a big refresher. There is a full new generation og CMS that are much more funny, usable and full of nice features.

Well there is a comparision with Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla here http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/sxsw-web-content-management-system-showdown-update-2-004124.php

This is the result demo of the sites http://www.cmsshowdown.com/

Also for Joomla there is a multi site comparison for larger demands with Jentla addon http://www.jentla.com/software/multisite-challenge.html

About Joomla lacking multicategories cck, ACL etc there is many free addons to solve this. Just examples...http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-a-security/backend-a-full-access-control/7010
http://www.jseblod-cck.com/ etc etc so It depends on what you want to do. A lot of time and money go for Drupal. Easy site for bloggin one to many - use Wordpress.

Drupal is a good blog CMS but is a real pain where design is concerned.
If you are skilled and have a lot of time then you might come to something acceptable (I still hate most of the theme done under Drupal).

Reserve posted "Drupal is used by thewhitehouse.gov for a reason! :-)" on Nov 13th ... as a good reason to use Drupal .... So how is the change and hope of the last 11 months working for you ?? .... I will be using Drupal, but for goodness sakes not because of the witness of the whitehouse !!

Drupal is not a bad CMS, but yes you can find better ones.
I did 2 sites with Drupal. It installs easily, is multilingual and can be extended by modules.
Actually installation of modules is mandatory as Drupal has very little features in core.

I would not recommend Drupal for big sites because it has very poor performance even though I used it only on dedicated servers. The many modules you need to install and the bad caching generate high volume of requests to the DB though slowing down dramatically the site performance.
Drupal is OK when considering small / medium sites.

The other bigger drawback is site design. No flexibility here and a templating system that is way behing many other CMS.

For these 2 reasons (performance and design) I can not use Drupal anymore.

It stupid to call one CMS better than another, many CMS systems are good for their intended use.

If you just want a simple blog, its overkill to Durpal - Use Wordpress instead.

You don't us a bazooka to kill a fly. (A bazooka CAN however kill a fly, but you see my point)

Drupal is for larger web sites, where scalability is important!

Drupal is used by thewhitehouse.gov for a reason! :-)

I've been wrestling with Drupal for a couple of days now - it's a bit fiddly but I've pretty much got most things where I want them. Sure is a headache compared to the ease of Website Baker, but I wanted to find out what all the fuss was about. I hate to say this as I know it is a far superior product, but it reminds me a bit of a Phpnuke installation in that to get the functionality you need one has to rely on 3rd party modules which are sometimes buggy - like nuke it has that held together with sticky tape feel about it - but not to the same extent as phpnuke. It's all very well using a valid CSS and XHTML template, but there's usually some module or another that screws up the validity of your code. I do find Drupal templates a bit easier to work with than website baker ones though.

As other people said, there is a learning curve, not everything is intuitively placed.

I intend to persevere because I can see it has a lot of power once the niggles have been sorted out. I expect the problems I am grappling with now will mean nothing to me in a month.

Here are my biggest out of the box gripes.

Search engine doesn't search Feed Aggregator - in Website Baker it does -straight out of the box.

You also need to set up a cron job to update the feeds? (Why not not just refresh them as they are demanded if they haven't been refreshed for a while?) - Website baker just does this with out you having to think about it - it also give you options for how many feeds to show and whether to show the feed image. If you are installing Drupal on windows and want feeds, you will have to set up a scheduled task to execute wget to call your cron.php via the web. Am I missing something? Does a mature cms like drupal have to go about things in such a convoluted way?

Friendly URLs have to be configured - WB does makes them automatically without rewrite mod.

No wysiwyg editing out of the box, has to be installed and installed with a mind boggling number of configuration option. I installed FCKeditor (same as WB uses) (it has to be installed in a different way to normal modules. Now I have FCKeditor toolbar showing up, but the formatting doesn't stick so that's another problem I have to solve. Website baker includes working wysiwyg support straight out of the box.

I initially tried to build my "big site" using Joomla - and it was going great. I had a nice looking site up and running in a short time, but Zina integration was essential for me and I didn't like the was Zina integrated with Joomla which is why I switched to Drupal. Drupal handles Zina much better.

I would recommend Drupal for a big website - you can have crazy fun with Books, Taxonomy and URL aliases. It seems very scaleable.

I think for small client sites though, you would go a long way to beat Website Baker.

my drupal site is at danbensondotcodotuk

I do not understand why everybody is shouting which CMS is better. You have to look to your customers ad the usability. If the customer is satisfied with the choice of CMS then you made a good choise. And the comparison of web 1.0 or web 2.0. It is the front end what you are building. If you use jquery and building twitter or other stuf in the front-end then it's also web 2.0. Your customers don't give a **** if your CMS is 1.0 or 2.0.
So it's better to look what is good for your customers instead what is good for you.

It was good cms, but i think there is much better cms then this becouse this one has a lot of bugs. And when you got hacked no one likes :)

I use Drupal for several years now. It used to be a good CMS.
Like others it has some strong points and some weak ones.
Today I prefer to use other CMS that are more advanced technologically.

Drupal IS WEB 2.0!!!

What else would you use to create a modern Social Network?

ModX, SilverStripe, ??? LOL

These are CMS without any big community. If only CMS is needed, I'd use WordPress.

But building up a community needs Blogs, Groups, Forums, etc - and WEB 2.0 is a community-WEB.

It's easy to be better in filling up content for ModX, SilverStripe ore something else when all they do is creating Content-Sites without interaction to an own community.

ModX & Co are there where Drupal was years ago: in WEB 1.5!

And now Drupal (Joomla little behind, Dolphin somewhere else) is building WEB 2.0 for normal Users.

At the moment a community has reached hoto users there is enough money in sight to build up a new core. But just to getting started Drupal is the best way.