Drupal – The advanced one

Drupal is another very popular CMS which has a pretty large community and many “modules” which extend the CMS the way you like.

In my opinion Drupal does the following aspects of being a CMS very good:

  • Creation of Content Types, Taxonomies and fields via backend
  • Built in caching system
  • Built in multilingual support
  • Built in backend error log viewer (Watchdog)
  • Very mighty permission system
  • You recieve e-mail notifications if the core or a module has security issues (if you subscribe to the security newsletter)
  • Built on Symfony and therefore you have TWIG as a template engine
  • The “Webform” module is the most advanced form module I have ever seen

Neutral aspects:

  • Requires PHP composer to install/update core and modules therefore you need SSH but you have dependency management. If you want to learn more about PHP composer see HERE
  • Backend content structure not as user-friendly as WordPress

Negative aspects:

  • If you want to do more than the provided functionality in the backend you will have a pretty steep learning curve on how to e.g. adjust the DOM the way you want it, learn what preprocessors are and how to adjust one element due to the configuration of another.
  • If a update goes wrong (either composer updates or database updates) the whole site will be down till you fixed it. It is very common that you have to add a patch to a module or the core so a specific problem doesn’t occur on your website till this patch has been merged into its own release version by the core team or the module developer.

Some Drupal facts

As per W3Techs Drupal is currently used for 2.6% of all CMS based websites and drives 1.5% of all websites available on the internet. (July 26th, 2020)
Source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management

Drupal starts of with 87 database tables, unlike WordPress with just 12 tables. There are many reasons why that is the fact. One of them is the fact, that each field gets its own table and the whole caching system requires its own tables.
See database diagramm here: https://www.drupal.org/files/Drupal8_UPsitesWeb_Schema_10-19-2013.png

So what I want to say is

Drupal is a CMS which is easy to use if you need exactly what it offers in the backend. If you need more customization of specific elements which are not already provided or are extendable by modules you will have a pretty hard time.

I love the fact, that multilingual support is built in and there is also no problem adding multilingual support after you have created the website because the whole system has that covered.

If you want to learn more about Drupal the site drupalize.me has very good descriptions and trainings.

Spread the love

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *