Is Drupal right for me?

If you find yourself asking the above question, I hope to help you find the answer. In this post I'm going to look at what Drupal does well, and what some of it's competitors do better. I will not focus so much on what Drupal does that it's competitors don't do, because if I did, my post would be obsolete within a month. Everyone is emulating Drupal.

Drupal is beastly. I mean that in a literal sense. If you threw Drupal in a pit with all the other content management systems out there, I'm pretty sure Drupal would come out on top. Drupal is a very powerful system, but as Spiderman taught me, with great power, comes great responsibility. What I mean is, if you can't or are unwilling to put the time in to learn the ins and outs of Drupal, you probably won't be very impressed with what is otherwise an excellent piece of software.

So why would you choose it? Read on to find out...

The Good Stuff

Community

Well, for starters, you won't find another CMS out there that is as well supported by its own community as Drupal. I think their approach to keeping all things Drupal-related centrally organized at one online location (drupal.org) is the best thing they ever could have done. Need a module? Drupal.org. Need a theme? Drupal.org. Need some advice/help? Drupal.org. Basically, anything you could possibly need for Drupal is only one URL away. They allow module and theme developers to store their work on Drupal's CVS servers, and every project has an issue tracker as well. The only other free CMS that I've personally used that even comes close to this nucleus-approach is Wordpress, but there is still a lot of splintering going on there.

Scalability

I can say with confidence that nothing scales as well as Drupal, that's free anyway. There are a lot of high-profile sites using Drupal these days, including Ubuntu, The Onion, The New York Observer, Warner Brothers' Records, even the Grateful Dead (I'm sure Jerry would approve!). And many more.

Why are they using Drupal? Well, quite simply... nothing else performs as well under load, that's why. Take this comparison with Joomla, for example. It's pretty clear who wins. And I've seen more than enough "Wordpress could not connect to the database" errors after someone's poor blog gets linked on Digg or Slashdot. Not so many with Drupal.

Drupal comes with a very powerful caching system (it must be enabled first) that is miles ahead of the contributed modules for Wordpress, which you must first find out about and install yourself.

Extendability

I touched on modules and themes in the Community section. For almost anything you can think of, there is probably already a Drupal module built to do it. And if there isn't, you'll find Drupal's well-documented API is a big help in creating it yourself, if you're so inclined. And creating themes with the powerful templating engine is a snap too.

User-Management

Drupal was designed from the outset for building online communities mainly, and this is what it does best to this day. The permission and user-privilege structure is second to none. You can create as many user-roles as you want and give them granular access to every module and its various functions.

OK, what's the catch?

By now, you're probably wondering what (if anything) Drupal isn't that great for. While I feel Drupal can be very easily adapted to anything your mind can dream up, there are some cases where a much simpler solution will suffice. Drupal is very complex, and for such things as personal or small-group blogs and websites, pretty much akin to using a nuclear bomb where a good hammer will do just fine. If all you want is a simple blog, and don't plan to extend it very much, Wordpress is recommended. If you want a rich site filled with lots of different types of content, Drupal is the best tool for the job.

If you want a CMS your grandma could manage, you won't find it in Drupal (or, I'd venture to guess 90% or more of every other CMS out there, but there are certainly easier ones).

In the end, it all comes down to what you're comfortable with, so I highly suggest giving Drupal, as well as other content management systems a try to see what works best for you, and use this as a guide.