Using Drupal for a large council website - advice needed please!
Hi
The council I work for is interested in moving to an open source cms for our website. We recently set up a small scale intranet using Joomla, and we love how user friendly the editor is. However, I have some concerns on its suitability for our much larger scale public website and have started looking at Drupal. What I need to know is that with the right developer and budget, if anything is possible with Drupal, or if there are currently any major restrictions we might achieve with a proprietary system (or alternative open source) that Drupal just can't offer.
The main requirments we have:
- Navigation/categorisation. This seems quite set/restrictive in Joomla and I've read that Drupal is more flexible. We would need to be able to link pages from more than one navigation location.
- Multi and subsites. We would ideally share content between intranet and internet. We may also need to set up separate sites with different designs. Again I'm not sure if Joomla is capable of this, but understand Drupal is geared up out of the box for multisites.
- Workflows, Editor permissions and groups. We need to be able to save both new pages and edits to existing pages in draft until an administrator can aprove and publish. Ideally the system would flag this up in the system. We also want to restrict editorial rights to pages by groups.
- Version control, roll back and audit trail of editors.
- We need to reach at least AA level for accessibility. Are there any issues with the cms on this front or is it purely down to templates?
- Speed - we need the site to perform for a customers.
- No restrictions on the design we want for the navigation/layout. Ability to have mini homepage designs within the site and different template layouts e.g. news, jobs, search etc - is this a downside of Drupal?
Any advice the group can offer me would be much appreciated. I'm keen to use either Joomla or Drupal but I don't want to recommend one and then find it can't deliver.
Cheers
Vic
Probably OK
It would be easy to say "just set up a site and see," but there is something of a learning curve to Drupal. I hope others will chime in here.
Let me answer what I can:
Navigation and categorization: Very flexible. You can link to pages in many ways from many places.
Multisite: no problem. Sharing content is not something I have done, however, so others may want to weigh in.
Workflow: There is an infrastructure for approval and version control.
I do not know what AA is.
Speed may be interesting. If you have a weak server and a lot of modules, speed may suffer. This can be offset by making aggressive use of cacheing and use of the Boost module. Then there additional tools that you can use.
There are no restrictions on design. With the new Panels 3, you can easily layout different pages very differently.
It will be some work, and some research, but you should find it rewarding.
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"He's said to be outspoken, but nobody's actually seen anyone do it"
Drupal, definitely
First, while Joomla is nice for small sites you'd quite quickly run up against limitations when using it on a larger scale - Drupal is definitely preferable in my experience, and after 12+ years' experience with content management systems in media companies, I'm not aware of anything that Drupal's incapable of doing.
Some specific answers to your questions:
- Navigation/categorisation.
Yes, this is far more flexible in Drupal than Joomla.
- Multi and subsites.
Yes, there are various options for multi/subsites - either built-in or using contributed modules.
- Workflows, Editor permissions and groups.
You'd want something like the Workflow or Revisions modules.
- Version control, roll back and audit trail of editors.
Drupal allows you to keep each version and roll back to them if you wish, with a record of who updated the content (though not always precisely what they did if it's a matter of changing categories etc).
- We need to reach at least AA level for accessibility.
Purely a template matter.
- Speed
Shouldn't be a problem as long as the site is configured and hosted appropriately.
- No restrictions on the design we want for the navigation/layout.
Again, purely a template matter
- Ability to have mini homepage designs within the site and different template layouts e.g. news, jobs, search etc - is this a downside of Drupal?
No, you can configure it to use different themes according to node type, URL, etc
All that being said - if you're starting from scratch (no matter what system you use) this is going to be a biiiiiiiig job. Contact me via my prefs address if you'd like to discuss in more detail.
Thanks for the advice
Hi Adam and Cayenne
Huge thanks for your feedback.
Adam - that's all really helpful to know. I forgot to ask - does Drupal have an any kind of document management module like Joomla does? (Docman)...that's one of the other items I wasn't sure on. We have a huge number of pdf files to add to the site, so I'd need to be able to keep control of them.
Cheers
Vic
You're welcome
There's no document management module that I'm aware of.
Drupal can certainly be configured to store PDF files - depending on your needs, this might be adequate.
Alternatively, there are integration modules for external document management systems:
- http://drupal.org/project/alfresco
- http://drupal.org/project/kt
Excellent
Cheers Adam - Alfresco looks ideal.