Hi, I've been using Mambo for a month or so. It's my first time with a CMS and I have found it to be quite buggy. Things would not work a certain way, it would break down with no way for me to fix it, modules won't work properly. Luckily this was my own personal blogging site so it doesn't matter that much. After that experience with my first CMS, I have been reluctant to use it on other sites for clients or more important sites. I am going to be testing out Drupal soon since I figure if Mozilla's team is using it, it must be pretty stable. What have been your experience with Drupal?

Comments

eveltman’s picture

Drupal's the best PHP based open source CMS I've encountered so far. And I've tested many.

romca’s picture

drupal is my first serious experience (before that I used a little Nuke, and ezPublish) - sofar, it was very stable and I have been doing very extensive work with duplicated tables (i18n.module), people here in library are starting to use it as an internal information system, and I am pretty confident that drupal is robust

version 4.4.1 - see www.knihovnabbb.cz

sepeck’s picture

Installing Drupal is the first time I successfully used a CMS as well. I have found Drupal to be very stable. (I tried phpWebsite but was unable to consistently get it to install right)

When you start remember a few things. Drupal is a base framework for your site. The default install comes with a very minimal set of modules, so you will probably want to add a few. Listing what you are trying to accomplish may get you more information that will get you a jump start than asking if it's stable. :)

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

tostinni’s picture

Hi,
I'm using it for a few days and I have to admit, I'm pretty enthousiast.
I try other CMS (mambo, but lack of acl yet, egroupware, plone) and all got a bunch of files, that made very difficult for me to go inside and look (adapt) on the source code.
So still need some time to get familiar with the philosophy of Drupal, but quite happy with it.

Bèr Kessels’s picture

Unless you have a very small v-host, that assigns you with far too little memory, drupal is stable, very stable.
I have never seen any of my sites collapse, other that becuase of the beforementioned memory problem.

[Ber | Drupal Services webschuur.com]

budda’s picture

Another problem Drupal has when installing on shared hosting is the database LOCK permission not being made available to the allocated dbase user for your hosting account.

There's a number of posts on this forum about it. Would just be nice if in the administration section there was some way to turn off the use of table LOCKing.

Using drupal on my dev system has been flawless. A top-class piece of PHP work - best i've ever used.

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

DB locking is neccessary for ensuring stability.

--
If you have troubles with a particular contrib project, please consider to file a support request. Thanks.

budda’s picture

Maybe so, but other web-apps don't require it - thus allowing them to be installed on a wider offering of web hosting. I've asked my hosting company to provide permission to use the MySQL locking, but its been declined.

I've now got to modify the Drupal core to get it working - which I wanted to avoid doing.

Sometimes you need to compromise between stability and compatibility :-S

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

I don't see why a webhoster should deny you the right to lock your tables. I'd consider switching.

--
If you have troubles with a particular contrib project, please consider to file a support request. Thanks.

budda’s picture

I noticed a lot of problems occur in Drupal if you enable caching too. Causes all manner of SQL errors to appear in logs. This is on 2-3 drupal sites i've been running now. Best to keep caching turned off for live sites at the moment IMO.

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www.bargainspy.co.uk | www.spamfo.co.uk | www.buddasworld.co.uk

robertdouglass’s picture

If you are talking about a plain-vanilla Drupal installation, and it is true that simply switching on caching causes errors, please file issues as such. This is not a widely known bug, nor one that I can reproduce.

What other modules do you have installed besides the ones that come with core?

Caching can save your site if you get slashdotted. Especially if you have a lot of people who come just to read an article, caching is essential. Don't just write it off because of one experience - it is one of Drupal's best features.

- Robert Douglass

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www.robshouse.net
www.webs4.com

nsk’s picture

I have tested several CMS and I have found Drupal to be the best one I have seen, although not perfect.

The main problem is that if you want to make it work for you, you need to customise it and load various modules etc. There is not much "out of the box" capability.

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NSK, Admin of Drupal-based site http://www.wikinerds.org

geokker’s picture

Generally impressed. I find Drupal to be rock solid and faster than most other CMS's I've pfaffed about with.

robertdouglass’s picture

The contributed modules vary in quality from inspirational to completely broken, so you have to choose these wisely. The default installation is highly polished and very stable.

- Robert Douglass

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www.robshouse.net
www.webs4.com

RonaldMurphy’s picture

I gave up on Mambo a while back. I've built sites with most of the popular cms packages (varieties of nuke, xoops, mambo, phpwebsite, etc.) and imo, nothing comes close to Drupal. Too many others were buggy and hard to theme.
There's a "however" to my liking Drupal so much. I suspect that we, as implementers, have certain mindsets about how an application should work. Those predispositions make us find one app to be easy to set up and use and another to be "impossible." For me, Drupal was the first product where everything fell into place.
I mention this because you may not have the same experiences with Drupal regardless of the recommendations here. It seems that the only thing that will really work is for you to test drive it for a while. Build a site, use it, add extra modules, tweak it and especially work through the design issues - the theming/css approach if you're going to be developing sites for others.
I think Drupal is the best thing going but you have to find out if that's true for you. Good luck with your search.