By Daviator on

I'm looking for some feedback please....

I have used Wordpress and Joomla and find them both to be quite intuitive (or at the very least, easy to figure out). I have some programming experience in CSS, HTML, and Javascript. While I'm not a PHP programmer, I can read and understand much of it.

However Drupal seems more like a toy for developers to play with or for job security for web developers.
"I know, I'll create the site in Drupal and this way the company will need me to maintain it.". OK, the last comment might have been a bit out of line.

With any project, I'd much rather spend my time creating what I need rather than learning the tool. Especially when there are other, easier to use tools.

For example, I created my home page in (using Drupal 7) but half of the content is hidden because of the "Read more" annoyance. I searched this forum and found many others in the same boat. I also found a dozen or so "fixes", none of them worked or were worth breaking the Drupal best practices of "no hacking the core" or "no hardcoding".

I also figured that if i hit this snag so early in the design process, what's going to happen when I want to things like add custom fields to a Contact Us form? Is that going to also require hard coding as well?

Also, since it is a "Content Management" tool, how hard is it going to be for my marketing department to add or change content?

So, why should I build my company's site with Drupal 7?

Comments

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

It's not about job security-- it's about power and flexibility (without having to hack). There's no reason for you to use drupal if your needs are met by joomla or wordpress and you're comfortable with them. For me, I found drupal when neither could meet the requirements of a project I needed to do and I know a lot of others who found drupal for a similar reason.

Now, having scaled the drupal learning curve, I usually find no need to use anything else-- even when the site requirements don't merit it. It's much easier for me to tweak drupal then have to figure out and/or fight peculiarities of wordpress (i won't go near joomla ever again, lol).

ojchris’s picture

ojchris commented

I see many newbies to web design scampering for joomla because it's easy to use for their thin knowledge. But why I've never considered joomla is for it's basic nature. That immediate "I'm made in joomla" nuance you get when you visit a made in joomla site with a lot unnecessary widgets (I'm speaking log in widget for a one page site for instance).

Drupal might be tough to grasp at first but largely encourages your development practices not degrade it.

r8r8r’s picture

r8r8r commented

Coming from the developer side, I agree, Drupal appears to be much of a dev toolset. However, during my first projects I tinkered around quite a bit on the code level, just to find out with experience, that many of the things I accomplished writing PHP were more easily accomplished by mastering the config options and finding the right theme and modules for the task at hand. Now I appreciate being able to combine the two concepts in a very clean fashion.
I do have a designer friend, who doesn't know any PHP, and she still builds Drupal sites. Just because the backend gives you that much flexibility. Granted, it comes at a price: it can be hard to find the right starting point and then it's a bit of a chore to get the hang of it. Good thing, there are tons of tutorials out there for just about any question.

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

so as a workflow and information/researchy type of person who has spent about 7 years working with drupal, i can honestly say that i can't think of situations and environments where drupal won't work - versus hitting the wall with wordpress or other systems.

this year, once again, i'm building out this crazy huge and complex information management system for enterprise use and beyond custom code, drupal is hands-down the most robust system to accommodate the extensive and highly nuanced requirements that i've outlined and envisioned.

it's not rocket science, most of what alienates people is (i think) the terminology used in the design of the system (nodes, views, taxonomies and so on) - wordpress does very well keeping it all drop dead simple.

joseonate’s picture

joseonate commented

>> OK, the last comment might have been a bit out of line.
It was - then delete it. You are in control of your keyboard.

Why Drupal?
http://www.avenuewebmedia.com/why-use-drupal

Good luck building an e-commerce store that bundles physical products with downloads using Wordpress. The point is that Drupal offers the flexibility to build and customize anything from the simplest to the most complex of sites. 10 years ago, startups intent on building serious websites needed teams of dozens of programmers for some of the stuff that a single expert developer can build with Drupal in 3 months.

If you are out to compare Drupal to Wordpress you are missing the point. Drupal offers customization an expansion far beyond what a blogging platform will ever do.

When should you user Drupal over Wordpress?
If you think your site can be built using Wordpress and you are comfortable working with Wordpress, then you are probably building something so simple that it may not make sense to look beyond Wordpress. In my experience, Drupal comes in when the requirements for functionality and customization far exceed the basic capabilities of a simpler platform.

SBurns-1’s picture

SBurns-1 commented

Good point on drupal vs wordpress. If you just want to blog, go with wordpress. That's not what drupal is for. But it's kind of like asking why have a circular saw if I already have a drill? Well, if you need to drill a hole, the drill will work just fine... but if you need to cut a sheet of plywood in two, the drill is not you're best tool. :)

Peterkphoto’s picture

Peterkphoto commented

I love wordpress because it's easy to use and I have never did any programming in my life.

Web Agent’s picture

Web Agent commented

I like drupal because I started with Notepad and phpMySql and moved to dreamweaver which was less irritating as the code changed color. :) . Built my own CMS and so on. But really what is the point. Drulpal is fast as and not as resource intensive as other CMS systems I have seen in the past. If you are looking for a scalable solution it is a great option for any developer.

As for the issues with custom fields in your contact form check out webforms. It beats hard coding and 7 works real nice with jQuery if you want to get creative. Great solution as far as I have seen. So far I have found solutions for all my problem in the modules area. And if you are good at php and learn the framework I believe the sky is the limit.

To help your staff update content you can create accounts for each of them and maybe implement one of the WYSIWYG's that has been contributed. You will even be able to see the times they last logged in with out any hard coding. There are so many modules you can get lost in them, but with a little research you will always find the right on. I felt the same when I started using Drupal. It though it was easier to write it all by hand then to figure out how to implement it and then even trouble shoot it once I have implemented it. But over the years I have found more and more that the system has a great deal of flexibility. And I believe it is the flexibility that is going to make Drupal the right choice. Here are two learning curve graphs I have come across that were interesting.

http://buytaert.net/drupal-learning-curve
http://preprocess.me/wtfs-drupal-learning-curve-found-on-the-interwebs