By dxb_kannel on

One of my client is HR Recruting company. he wants to get his web site developed which has followings

Announcements
Mail
Calendar
Document Sharing and Versioning
Meetings
User privelege
Notification through email

can i achieve all this by drupal.

Comments

Ildar Samit’s picture

Ildar Samit commented

Yes. (Except I'm not sure what you mean by mail.)

best_ecig21’s picture

best_ecig21 commented

company email? or sort of personal email?

texxs’s picture

texxs commented

Actually Drupal doesn't do most of those things out of the box. An honest answer to your big question, the last one, is:

Yes, if you're a developer, and you will be administering the site (including adding, updating all the content) Drupal is for you. If you are Drupal is a better choice than Joomla for sure, but you still may want to consider WordPress. If not, then you should consider something else.

I have stopped using Drupal and especially Joomla for my clients and gone with WordPress because I'd rather build and hand over and provide support.

At this time Drupal doesn't have the features needed for clients to be able to edit their own pages off the shelf (look at adding posts here, there's no buttons they want you to add HTML to fromat the text, same with pages in a Drupal site. This is not acceptable to clients, they want to push a "B" button to make some text bold like in WordPress. Want to add a picture? Better have an FTP client available and know how to reference with it an absolute path in valid HTML. Yes there several different modules that add a WYSIWYG interface and even a couple that add pics to a page but:

Standard modules frequently don't work, are often very complicated to install (like the WYSIWYG mentioned above) and even when it you do finally get it all working so that a client can edit or create a page themselves (including adding a picture, and adding some formatting to the text without having to write tags), they often just don't get where to put the content etc.

I only have three clients with CMS's they manage themselves currently and I went from several support phone calls a week down to zero since January and the clients rave about their sites now instead of complain.

  • BTW, what the heck do you mean by meetings? Drupal can't do that, not out of the box.
  • Calender? Not out of the box.
  • Document Version Control? No way, not out of the box.
  • User Privileges, sure, but don't expect the client to comprehend.
  • Mail? Well, that could mean so many things that I'll leave that one alone for now but I suspect that no CMS does what your anticipating in this regard.
  • Remember just because there is a module that says it does something, does it mean that it even works at all, much less do what it says. apparently they are not vetted in any way because I had run into many that just flat out don't work.

Overall Drupal is easier for Clients and Admins that Joomla is, but it's still not acceptable for a client managed web site by any means.

I don't usually going around dissing a product on it's own forum, but:

I wish someone would here would have been honest with me when I asked a similar question years ago.

Besides, I'm not really dissing, because if you are a developer and you do want to administer a web site your self, then Drupal is a viable option.

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

Standard modules frequently don't work, are often very complicated to install (like the WYSIWYG mentioned above) and even when it you do finally get it all working so that a client can edit or create a page themselves (including adding a picture, and adding some formatting to the text without having to write tags), they often just don't get where to put the content etc.

Installing and configuring the wysiwig module AND tinymce AND imce takes about three minutes. It is not difficult, but you have to follow the directions carefully. If you create websites using Drupal that are "still not acceptable for a client managed web site by any means," I would suggest that the problem is not in the technology.

texxs’s picture

texxs commented

I disagree, so do my web designers.

I will say it is possible. While we have only done perhaps less than a half dozen times, in some instances it didn't work at all. It has never been"simple" by any means. Read the instructions, if you think that's a simple process, well good for you. I doubt most people would. My staff doesn't think so, and they aren't exactly dumb or uneducated.

And then consider it's a step that never need to exist in the first place. What kind of CMS doesn't have a interface for adding and formatting content. To the end client that is the #1 reason for using a CMS. At least that's what my clients tell me.

Like I said Drupal does have it's strong points. Easy of use and use for end clients are not among them however.

Stew-bee’s picture

Stew-bee commented

I my experience you are correct about one thing, Drupal is harder to learn for the developer, it takes much more time, effort and maybe ability at first to build sites with Drupal than other CMSes, but if you put in the time and effort your investment will be rewarded with web sites that are much more powerful and flexible.

You are just factually wrong when you say that the Drupal developer must administrator the site. Thousands of well built Drupal sites go on line ever month that are just as easy or easier for the end user than Wordpress or any other CMS. I am sorry that your experience with Drupal was not positive, Drupal is not for everybody, and you are welcome to relate your experience, negative or positive, here. But please do not project your failure to get Drupal to work on to Drupal as a whole, it just is not true and in some cases just absurdly false. There are hundreds of thousand of Drupal sites live, of all shapes and sizes, and in all but a few the end users are the ones that add content. It would hardly by a CMS if this was not true. And in general on a Drupal site non technical end users, with a little training and or documentation, can do a lot more than add content, they can add pages, change navigation, add new types of content, change styling, change functionality, and on and on.

It is true that Drupal dose not have a WYSIWYG content editor out of the box, but that is by design. Drupal does not real have hardly any functionality out of the box. One of the basic design principles of Drupal is that functionality is provide by modules. This design principle makes Drupal superior to other CMSes. It allows Drupal to be flexible, customizable, to have greater functionality and power, and yet to not be slowed down with bloated code. But yes this requires a lot more of the developer. The WYSIWYG editor is the perfect example. In other CMSes they have a editor already installed, maybe it can be modified maybe not, you get what you get, this is very easy for the developer. In Drupal it is not that easy, but is infinity more flexible, you can get any type of editor your client wants. Any editor is possible in Drupal from something simple like on this site all the way up to something that is similar to MS Word.

Hopefully this decision will help the original poster. While Drupal has had explosive growth in the last few years, it is still true that it is harder for new, or less skilled developers and does take an investment in time to learn. Drupal is trying to improve in this area. Drupal 7 is an big improvement, for newer site builders. And Drupal distributions like Drupal Gardens also help.

kaakuu’s picture

kaakuu commented

Regarding WYSIWYG, this was the first issue in WYSIWYG in core. Not sure, whether this topmost priority thing has been done in latest alpha 7

Regarding, adding modules this article is worth reading The problem of Drupals exponential complexity

Ildar Samit’s picture

Ildar Samit commented

Definitely valid points. Especially two of them:
1) WYSIWYG -- I've had problems too (although most can be solved -- it works reasonably well actually if done right...), and
2) Ease of maintenance (Wordpress is hands down better in this regard, since you can click and update instantly).

I have to admit I was wrong in saying "yes" originally. I missed Meetings (not sure what the original poster meant by that), and Document versioning (I thought of content versioning). User privileges are out of the box though, and calendar might have to be plugged in manually if there's no suitable module. What I meant to say was it can be done if you're a developer, but didn't mean out of the box! Sorry.

Either way, if you know how to code, include Drupal when choosing the CMS. It's very good.

dxb_kannel’s picture

dxb_kannel commented

i am just a beginner in web designing, php. i am ready to giv my 100% for drupal. my question is can i do all these things

announcements
meetings
calendar
document sharing, versioning

actually i want to know can i make sharepoint type of site through drupal.

mradcliffe’s picture

mradcliffe
he/him
Primary language English
commented

The only difficult thing to setup there is document version control.

There are several thoughts on this:

  1. Use a third party system, like sharepoint, alfresco, googledocs, to do this for you.
  2. Look for a contrib module: document or file_newest_revision to do most of what you need and then...
  3. Write your own code.

To start... you want to break your "features" down:

  1. What is an announcement? Is it a piece of content on your front page? Is it a piece of content that gets mailed out to users?
  2. What is a meeting? Is it a piece of content with a couple of date fields attached?
  3. What is a calendar? Is it a view of meetings?
  4. Do you want to separate the site into groups or departments? Maybe Open Atrium is a good place to start (a distribution of Drupal)

It's tough to do when you begin to learn Drupal, but eventually you start learning things. Take a look at the module-a-day podcast, which is short and sweet (as opposed to the hour long ordeals of Lullabot podcasts). This will start giving you ideas about how Drupal contrib fits into the picture.