The 2026 Drupal Business Survey is open. Your response will help shape the future of the Drupal business ecosystem.
By slinky on
Here's the big dilemma... I've been using Joomla for years. Modules appear great. Designs look beautiful. Easy to set up. But when it comes right down to it, there is very poor SEO, it's heavy, and it does have its issues. I wasn't thrilled with the direction the new Joomla team set forth either. So I had decided to move my site over to either Drupal or Wordpress to handle our "magazine" section which will have a number of articles.
Now here's where it gets sticky. Wordpress always looked and felt like a blog. In some areas it is still annoyingly bloglike although it is moving towards a better cms. It does very well with SEO and I just got a design template that looks astonishingly good for a newspaper type site. It's also simple to use, has great plugins, and also can be integrated with our vbulletin forum which has a very large number of posts.
Then there is drupal. The answer usually is "no, it is not just for developers and pro designers." Well, let's be honest here. The tool seems much more versatile. It also allows you to have better "author pages" that wordpress doesn't really do well with its inability to simply have a listing of all an author's articles or even a author profile page if you click on the link for an author. But there is a serious price to pay with drupal and let me explain.
I'm by no means a novice with php and linux and can do a little hacking. But it appears that managing items with drupal is far more complex and challenging than it is with anything else. Setting up a site that looks and feels professional seems to take much more work as does templating it to appear like a nice news site. Yes, I've seen some decent sites but my $250 Wordpress template allows me to easily just set my categories and go. Joomla does almost the same too. But I really haven't seen a good example of drupal being set up quickly without much pain to look impressive. These success stories are great but they typically involve months of programming and serious cost. I know how much sites like jewcy.com cost and the New York Observer is nice too but - let's face it - this was not such a simple task.
So the question remains to those of you who may have gone down this road. For a basic ezine, did you run into serious limitations with Wordpress? What did you find that Drupal gave you that you wouldn't want to turn back or towards Wordpress? How long or easily did it take for you to create such a site, what existing modules might help and does Drupal play well with vBulletin? I truly appreciate all responses and thoughts as this one is a big change and I need to give it a great deal of planning! I've got a nice site to move!
Comments
I've seen another site here
I've seen another site here - betternetwork.com - which is nice but took months. Again, this is something similar to what I'd like to build in my own niche but the time to build and money and resources just seems significant in drupal and easier accomplished more rapidly also with other tools. I'm hoping someone can comment on the above item on (1) whether drupal can more easily be used quickly to create a decent looking magazine site without configuring everything for weeks, e.g. basic author pages, (2) what it takes to put a little more integration of features into better bio and activity like betternetwork. Yes drupal is powerful but it seems like you need a lot of resources to do good work that is more quickly accomplished with other tools.
.
I haven't used Joomla or WP so maybe I'm not qualified to answer but I'll give it a shot. Putting a site together with Drupal isn't hard but it does have a learning curve. WP is geared towards blogs and is meant so someone's grandma can get up and running with a blog quickly and easily. Drupal is designed to build websites. Any website. A blog, a newspaper, a social networking site, a brochure page, and internal company website, anything. Because of that flexibility, it can be like sitting down with a huge box of legos and no picture and trying to piece it all together. With WP, you get one of those little boxes with the picture on it, but if the picture is of a ship you're going to be hard pressed to build a car with it.
If the picture WP offers is what you need and all you'll ever need, that's the simpler route. If you think you want something that doesn't quite fit the mold, welcome to Drupal, the huge box of legos. :)
Michelle
--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
Michelle - thanks and I
Michelle - thanks and I guess that's a great response. Perhaps the best question to ask would be whether there is any good example of a site that has been built which lists the components/plugins/downloads used to build the site? With a CMS like Joomla, perhaps the best example of a Drupal competitor, there are lists of modules which people have in order to add the "social networking and community" element to sites as well as the most useful modules. Templating is also simple.
I'll give you a good example - if you go to theming sites like rockettheme.com or templateplazza.com, you'll see sites already built that include a list of plugins/modules that are installed to build the sites. I can have something up that looks quite good in just a few hours - at most. With drupal it feels like a bunch of lego blocks strewn all over the place in some type of order but no good examples and instructions - like those illustrated diagrams showing you how some neat lego spaceship was built using the pieces in the box. :)
Sites like betternetwork.com, for the most part, can be built with Joomla in under a day and can be done very well by purchasing just a few "professional" plugins. Quite frankly, I couldn't really get a feel for how to do this with drupal, just a couple of rough examples of how pages were constructed, e.g. the NY Observer. A beautiful site but you really have to invest a lot of time just to get the basic elements off the ground. Does this make sense? I
Sorta
It's not on par with rockettheme by any stretch, but I do give a list of modules used here:
http://socnet.shellmultimedia.com/
Michelle
--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
back to the lego's
Is the picture of a car a sports car, sedan, luxury car or SUV? There are a number of ways to build a car.
Drupal core is built to be flexible. We have still some very task specific modules, but as our community matured, a lot more very flexible modules evolved to fulfill different roles. This makes it difficult to just pick up and drip things in because of this and the various interrelationships between modules.
So as, as it says here, start with a plan. Your best bet is to post a specific list of features in the before you start forum (new post) looking for suggestions and advice, then go play with what you get.
Some people have shared how they built theirs and there is a very good write up on the New York Observer there.
http://drupal.org/cases
http://drupal.org/success-stories
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Good point Steven. Here's
Good point Steven. Here's ultimately what I built elsehwere and am looking to rebuild - a medical community that provides information (yes, with disclaimers) about different ailments that has some community features, very similar to betternetwork.com that I've seen here. Essentially it needs to have:
1) A "magazine" section where community members can author featured articles on a variety of topics, e.g. orthopedics, allergies, etc.
2) User forums where members of the community can ask questions which are answered by other members and also medical professionals (whom I'd like to be able to also be identified in their profile or title in the forum posts in the area about the poster info). Right now I've got a pretty large vBulletin forum that is pretty well indexed. I'm not sure if I want to dump them all into a Drupal forum but I'd consider it.
3) A medical documents file repository where people can download bulletins, article reprints in PDF, doc and zip formats
4) A medical directory where members can put in information about their organization. Ideally this could be cross linked to a user's profile, e.g that a user is a member of such and such medical office but that is more like a bonus.
5) User profiling as you'd see anywhere else, better with tabs like you see at betternetworker.com and I've seen in numerous places (Joomla's community builder automates this process for the most part)
6) An information directory where medical texts can be entered, e.g. an online medical dictionary.
7) Community plugins that make it more "fun" such as a rewards or point system (I've got that for my forums) where users get rewards for activities.
8) Integrated Photo/media gallery where users can post albums of photos or video or audio - this can for the most part be done with photopost which is integrated with vBulletin. I'd consider what drupal has to use for this.
9) A calendar system to post events. Ideally it would have an ability to keep track of who is attending but this isn't necessary.
10) A FAQ and help desk - this I'll use any ticketing system and not important to integrate.
11) Ideally I'd like to have "groups" but it's really not as necessary when you've got forums but I'd consider it.
12) A decent looking theme. Quite frankly, with the exception of those who spent a significant amount of money to put one together, I think most drupal themes are poor, boxy and clumsy in general.
13) A home page and ability to put into tabbed areas the latest videos, posts, activity on the site.
I got some estimates to build some of the community sites using drupal. I've been able to put together some pretty nice sites pretty quickly. The cost using drupal was remarkable since most of it was payment to professional programmers to do a lot of custom work. Regarding the above, sure it takes some money to make it well integrated and some time but, for the most part, I can get it done with other tools in under 2 weeks and just a few thousand dollars - conservatively and maximum. Most of that would be paid for design work and some minor customization for using external "professional" components but they are there, e.g. vbulletin, etc.
How is that for specifics? :D Thanks much for your help. I appreciate the community effort here and wouldn't have considered posting if I didn't think that Drupal had a lot to offer and a community of good people, which it does. :)