Review of Drupal Content Management System (CMS)
This is the program I chose because it had the collaborative story feature I needed for one of the websites I was creating. What I did not realize at the time was how complex and complicated Drupal was to use. Before I offer my thoughts on Drupal, let’s take a look at some of the basics.
Drupal is a free and open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. You must have PHP and a database like MySQL installed in order to use Drupal.
Some of Drupal’s features include RSS-feeds, customized page layouts, and the ability to set up forums, shopping carts, and community websites for user-generated content. You can customize using Drupal’s core plug-in modules contributed by open source community members. You can change the look and feel of the site using several contributed “themes.”
Here are my thoughts…
Drupal is meant for more advanced web designers. Drupal has many advanced features like the collaborative story-writing feature I mentioned and they have support for multiple sites and multiple authors. But it is quite complex to use.
Drupal is only meant for you if:
- You know CSS and HTML and are comfortable modifying code. If you have just a basic understanding of code, don’t use Drupal. Just don’t. In order to make Drupal function properly, you need to decipher Drupal’s code. Since you will be modifying code that someone else created it could be more complex than creating the code yourself.
- You know how to write PHP programs. PHP is basically a more advanced type of code. If you don’t have experience with PHP, you will have a very difficult time using Drupal.
- You need support for multiple sites and multiple authors.
I found out the hard way that Drupal was meant for people with advanced knowledge of code, PHP, and web design.
Beyond that, just the installation was very difficult and took MUCH longer than I expected. I felt that their administration interface was very confusing, hard to follow, and simply not user-friendly. They do not have a very good support forum, either. If you need support, it seems that you need to ask 10 different people to get an answer. Remember, most of the people that use Drupal are advanced web designers, and if you’re not one of them, you will be confused quite often.
However, if you have a good understanding of web design and code, you might be very pleased with Drupal. If you want to give Drupal a shot, you can find all the information you need and instructions to get you going in the Starting a site with Drupal article.
