Drupal 5.1 review
- Rating: 8.5/10
- Release version: 5.1
- License: GNU/GPL, Open Source
- Homepage: http://drupal.org
- OpenSourceCMS.com demo
- CMSMatrix.org listing
Drupal is one of the most powerful Content Management Systems on the web today: in terms of scalability, features, security and templating I found it to be the best CMS of all. Its flexibility allows you to create almost any type of site you would want: from a simple blog to a forum or an e-commerce site – with a little bit of tweaking it’s all possible.
After building a good number of sites with other Content Management Systems, including Mambo, Joomla and WordPress (my other favorites), I found myself limited and wanted a highly customizable framework. Some of the features I missed from other systems and I found in Drupal:
- flexible templating system – Joomla has its own templating system, one which is very limited. This leads to a very heavy code output which can be corrected, but it is a headache…
- content types and content organizing system – Joomla’s stiff content organizing method (sections and categories) is very restricting, something I hope the programmers will fix in upcoming versions. WordPress’ organization is a lot better, almost as good as Drupal’s.
- scalability and performance – out of the three (Drupal, WordPress and Joomla) Drupal handles the best under pressure, and has the best caching system. Also, from what I’ve been hearing from programmers (I am not one, so I rely on others for this), Drupal is the one of the most programmer-friendly CMS’ out there.
After I did a little bit of research I kept hearing about Drupal and I tried it immediately. It was a little hard at first to get accustomed to the way it works but after some tinkering I found it to be a framework suited for almost all I needed.
Being a heavy Mambo user I found some of Drupal’s features a breath of fresh air: the taxonomy system is a lot better for the categorization of content and the clean code (both in the output and in the template) is far better than most content management systems on the net today.
Also, if you want to build a community site Drupal is perfect: the user access control options are granular so maximum control is actually achievable in a default installation, with no extra modules required.
Drupal requirements:
Most webmasters will be happy to learn that Drupal runs on Windows as well as on *NIX (Unix, Linux and FreeBSD family). For Windows you will need Apache or IIS 5/IIS 6 and of course Apache for Unix as well.
As the interpreter you need PHP 4.3.3 or higher for Drupal 4.7.x. If you have PHP 5.2 only Drupal 4.7.5 or 5.x will work.
For databases: MySQL (4.1 or 5.0) or PostgreSQL (<7.3) although MySQL is recommended because almost all the modules are made for it.
Drupal learning curve and usability:
Learning Drupal can be a little bit difficult for webmasters that haven’t used a CMS before or are used to simple ones like WordPress. One of the problems here might be the unusual back-end that is integrated with the front-end – a logged in user can access the administration interface through the site navigation.
Also, the customization of a new install can be somewhat frustrating for a new user. To get Drupal to look and behave the way you want it you must install a few modules (maybe a WYSIWYG editor, the Views module, etcetera), set up user groups and their respective access control and maybe even create a new theme.
Drupal security:
Although it’s much better than other content management systems, Drupal’s security is still not perfect. What makes me feel safe using Drupal is the fact that critical bugs don’t appear so often as for other systems. When they do patches are released almost immediately, which is also reassuring.
Another pro for Drupal’s security is the ACL, or Access Control List. An administrator can create any number of user groups and assign access to each individual module and its actions. This granular access control is one of the best I’ve seen in any CMS, and considering it’s built-in is a big plus for Drupal.
Drupal modules and applications:
Drupal comes with a lot of built in applications that you can use as a base “recipe” for almost any kind of site. Whether you want to build a community site, a blog or just a presentation site there are optional modules to help you build any kind of site.
- Blog – will make posts behave as on any other blog, they will be sorted chronologically; also, posts from sub-categories can be seen in their respective parent categories.
- Page – creates normal pages, just as you would expect on any normal site.
- Book – helps you arrange pages in a group (or book, if you prefer). It’s especially useful when you have a piece of content that seems too big to be on only one page; you can give the book a home page and sort the others any way you want.
- Forum – create forums. This module may not have as many features as the full-fleged scrips out there but it’s good enough for most webmasters.
- Polls – capture votes on different topics in the form of multiple choice questions.
- Aggregator – it helps to keep your site fresh by aggregating content from other sites by using their RSS feeds.
- Throttle – this module, together with the cache option, proves that Drupal has been coded with serious sites in mind. When your site is under a heavy load (you can specify what “heavy” means) the throttler will disable other modules and improving performance.
Although there are some functions already built-in one of the most compelling features in Drupal is the fact that it’s one of the most extensible frameworks. There are many hooks that have allowed programmers to create an impressive list of modules. Some of them are very important for sites of all types:
- Content Construction Kit (CCK) – this module allows you to create new content types. What can this be used for? Let’s say you need to make a web directory and you need custom fields for site description, keywords, reciprocal link and an option for a free or payed listing – you can create these right in your browser with CCK.
- Codefilter – simple and useful filter for web professionals: you can list code on your page and not have it executed or modified by PHP.
- Meta tags – this module is very useful for search engine optimization, and actually makes Drupal the best search engine friendly CMS. It lets you define 6 meta-tags: copyright, description, keywords, geourl, robots and abstract. Of course, you can select which ones to output.
- Pathauto – yet another great module that helps you get more visitors from the search engines. The default clean urls output by Drupal look like “example.com/node/5″, which are good, but not as good as Pathauto’s urls – these can be configured to take the words from titles and categories and display them any way you like.
- Poormanscron – this module is very useful when you don’t have access to the cron application on your server. For every page view the module checks if the cron job was run more than 1 hour ago (you can configure the time period); if not, it will activate and run the cron job.
- Moxie WYSIWYG Editor (Tinymce version) – most people don’t want to lose time writing html code for every link, unordered list or what have you. This is when the TinyMce Editor is most useful: allowing non-tech folks to focus on writing content, not code!
- Scheduler – this module provides a much needed function for many webmasters: it allows you to specify a future date on which the node you are editing to appear. WordPress had this for a long time, and I missed it a lot when I switched to Drupal.
- Webform – allows you to create any type of form with multiple text areas and fields, captchas, email fields (with validation), drop down boxes, hidden fields and others. Results can be sent to an email address, stored in the backend or both.
- Views – the Views module gives flexibility to the way content is presented without hard coding it in a template file. It has an interface that allows you to build a set of smart queries that will then be presented as a page or a block.
- XML Sitemaps – this was changed from “Google Sitemaps” when the 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) started supporting xml sitemaps. For more info visit Sitemaps.org.
Drupal documentation and support:
From my point of view, this is the only point where Drupal is lacking – I feel like I could have skipped a headache or two if somebody that had the knowledge had answered some of my questions.
Of course, as in any case, support from the community is not required (since it’s free) but some other content management system communities benefit from a more friendly behaviour towards newbies and ,well, complaints. The “if you don’t like it fix it yourself” view of some members isn’t really helpful.
Still, you must not worry – support from the community is still one of the best out there and I’m sure that you’ll find answers for almost all your problems!
Drupal sites:
Official and important sites:
- Main Drupal site (homepage)
- Drupal Modules (all available modules for Drupal)
- Drupal Themes (the themes section on the main site)
- Drupal Theme Garden (allows you to try out all the themes that are on the main site)
- Drupaler Theme (same as above but a bit more organized)
Other notable Drupal sites: