CMS

I got an email from a friend earlier today asking me some questions about Drupal. I thought that others might like to have answers to these questions as well. His questions will be in blue.

I wondered if I could ask you a couple of questions about Drupal, since I seem to remember you saying you have worked a bunch with it. I’m getting more and more clients in this changing economy who have smaller and smaller budgets for company websites but I still want to be able to try to offer them a new site that can be managed completely by them with a CMS, for as little a price as possible.

Everyone is looking to save money. Can't say I blame them.

So my overall question would be, could Drupal be the product for this?

Well... Maybe. Drupal is a great program, but it does have it's flaws. Drupal is free, which is great. There are a lot of people developing for it. There are a lot of modules you can download. Drupal is also highly customizable. If you have a developer, you can do amazing things with Drupal. Without a developer you can do quite a lot, but it would take someone with some fairly strong HTML and CSS skills and some basic PHP skills to do it well. If a developer set up the site for them, they could maintain it without the need of a developer on staff.

Some of the customization of Drupal can be cumbersome. Doing basic customization can be very easy and some of the themes you get can easily be changed in certain ways. Colors are easy to change as are what goes into each region, but where the regions are is an example of something that can be difficult. If I want to add something to my sidebar, or any of the other block regions, I just add that block to the region. Drupal is quite easy to use in that way.

There are a lot of modules, and a lot of developers, but since developers are not paid, and there might only be one developer for a module, then if that developer is no longer able or willing to maintain the module it does not get updated. This might mean that it is a major chore to upgrade from one major revision of Drupal to the next. They are still maintaining the older version (5.x). Some people are even still running an even older version (4.7). If it is doing what you want, you do not need to upgrade, but if you want the newer cooler stuff that newer versions offer, you want to upgrade.

If so, is it user friendly enough for most designers who have some basic HTML knowledge to design and create a site themselves? Or do you really still have to be a developer?

Someone with some HTML can create a site themselves. They may not be able to do all of the theme stuff they want to do easily, but assuming that they want to do what the software was designed to do, or a module has been created to do what they want, then they can do it, with some help. Basically it depends on what it is that they want to do. If they want a site that has a bunch of articles, blogs, forums, pictures, etc and want them nicely organized with tags, directories, or what not, then Drupal can do it. Using directories can get a little difficult with Drupal, depending on what you want, because it requires a module. The build in system uses taxonomy, which is basically tags, to track content. I'd need to know what they wanted to know if Drupal was the right option for them.

And is it easy enough to implement just about any look and feel design and layout that you have? Or are you restricted by the framework and templates of the product?

There are very few restrictions on how it looks, but the template system is complex. There are a lot of templates available, and they can all be easily customized. Some changes are easy to make, others, not so much. Once you get used to the theme system it gets easier, but like any CMS, learning it can have a high learning curve.

Most things can be controlled through the CSS, so changing colors, font size, etc is really easy. But the locations of some pieces can be challenging to move around. For instance, say you have a content type that you have 4 different tags on. By default, all the tags are listed together. If you want to list those tags separately that requires a little customization. I can easily do that now, but the first time I tried to do it I had trouble finding directions. Some location customization is made easier with the module Content Templates. Without it, you have to build it in the back end and it gets painful.

And lastly, is Joomla another or better consideration because of features etc?

I can't speak to Joomla as I have never used it. I would like to look at it some time, but have not had the need to yet and don't have time to work in a system that I don't need to. I've heard a lot of good things about it and it should be competitive to Drupal. I think they both probably have some parts that are better than the other.