Detailed Ratings
Description
Drupal is a free, open-source web development platform for online content and user communities. Drupal powers some of the busiest sites on the web, and can be adapted to virtually any visual design. Drupal runs over a million sites, including WhiteHouse.gov, World Economic Forum, Stanford University, and Examiner.com.
Capabilities:
| Capability | Availability |
|---|---|
| Document Library | No |
| Event Management | No |
| Jobs | No |
| Search | Yes |
| RSS | No |
| Publishing Workflow | Yes |
| Analytics/ Statistics | No |
| Personalization | No |
| Taxonomy | Yes |
| Multilingual | No |
| Mobile Website Support | No |
| FAQs | No |
| Meta Data Tags | Yes |
| Workflow Framework | Yes |
| Mobile Authoring Client | No |
| Audit Trail | No |
| Photo Gallery | No |
| Geolocation | No |
| Sitemap | No |
| Preview for Mobile Device Layouts | No |
| Multi-Site | No |
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Often Compared to:
Joomla!
Liferay Portal
Liferay Portal is an enterprise web platform for building business solutions that deliver immediate results and long-term value.
Proven real world performance with marquee clients across industries
Rapid innovation with customer-contributed sponsored development and new releases every 8 months
A strong community with roughly 4 million downloads and 350,000-500,000 worldwide deployments
SharePoint
The capabilities of SharePoint 2010 work together to help your company quickly respond to changing business needs. Using SharePoint 2010, your people can share ideas and expertise, create custom solutions for specific needs, and find the right business information to make better decisions. For IT, SharePoint 2010 helps you cut training and maintenance costs, save time and effort, and focus on higher business priorities.
Drupal is the way to go!
Drupal is an amazing CMS which allows you to build sites of all complexities. It has thousands of contributed modules which allow you to build upon the functionality of the core software. Best of all, it's OPEN SOURCE. We build client sites on the Drupal platform which continues to see more involvment from the community, which in turn provides a better end product. Drupal is the way to go.
Drupal is great
Drupal hardly needs much of a review here - as it's popularity is exploding.. just go to drupal.org to learn more about it. The Capability chart above leaves a ton out - or is flat wrong on several counts.
There are thousands of 3rd party modules that are vetted and tracked through the open source process, which give all the functionality that you might want, if it's not part of core Drupal. For example, there are events modules, jobs modules, etc.. Drupal is multi-lingual in it's core, but you can also add the translation module for added functionality. RSS is also part of core, feeds are auto-generated. Plugin the google analytics module, the sitemap module, etc.. And drupal is multi-site in it's core, that's not a problem at all.
But Drupal also gives you the tools to build a lot of things that you might say are "missing". You can define your own content types, such as "events" (if you want to create an events list or calendar) or "photos" (if you wanted to build a gallery). And then you can create custom fields for those types. So for the event type, you might create a start date field, or an end date field. You could create an image field for the photos, and then use the Views module (which is amazing) to put together the gallery.
That's just a small taste of the underlying strength of Drupal. There's a whole process of custom theming, based on provided core templates, and a full development API so that you can development custom modules to do whatever you want pretty quickly. These are just part of the reason I have enjoyed working as a full-time drupal developer for the past several years.
Drupal particulary is good for large organizations with several content managers and lot of content. It has a great user / roles/ permissions system - which is also customizable. For example, I'm currently working on a site which taps into Drupal's user login hooks to do user authentication from the company's LDAP system, and makes SOAP calls to various web services.
Speed can sometimes be an issue with Drupal - but if you read up on the techniques for caching and PHP server performance in books like Pro Drupal 7 Development (Tomlinson), you can get a solid Drupal site moving fast. I would also say that because it's a huge system, there's a lot to learn and it takes time.