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Our outsourced website developers are moving as a company towards drupal and are trying to move their clients onto this too. I'm not sure it is the best thing for us as have read quite a bit about drupal now and issues other people have had. At the end of the day our cms was and is designed specifically for us.
What are other people's experiences here? Are larger information sites moving more towards open source cms's - are they cheaper and easier than staying with your own bespoke cms? Our developers say that the advantage of using Drupal over bespoke is that Drupal has a large community which means that many re-usable modules are available to the community as well as free updates and patches when required, whereas with our own system, we could potentially run in to issues when new browsers are released, and any new functionality will have to be built from scratch.
Does anyone have any good advice on this one?
Thanks for any help.
Drupal runs a lot of huge, busy sites. The Onion, NASA, some other biggies. The Drupal site itself for that matter. So it can handle it.
It's my CMS of choice. I switched over a couple of years ago from building bespoke CMS to drupal. I had looked into various CMS over time and felt that they were either prohibitively expensive for small sites like mine, required special server setups or had kind of a Mickey Mouse feel. About the time that Drupal hit version 4.7 and Joomla broke off from Mambo (about 4-5 years ago), I felt like the options started looking pretty good. Now there are many excellent options, and Drupal is one of them.
Personally, unless i had very specific needs, I can't imagine coding a bespoke CMS at this point.
Drupal and Joomla have thousands of modules that allow for relatively rapid development. Everything your developers say is true. Want to add video? I barely know how to record video and would have to study up a lot just to know what I wanted to code, not to speak of the coding itself. Drupal, however, gives me several options that work off the shelf and, in Drupal 7, media handling should be much improved.
My question would be, is there a business/technical reason for doing this now, or are they just hurting from the recession and are selling the latest and greatest things.
It depends a lot on your site.
1. Does it need a major overhaul?
That's a good time to look into building on a new platform and I would agree with your developers. If they are switching over to Drupal and you have a good relationship with them, I would say switch to drupal when you're ready for an overhaul. I would say the same thing if they had decided on Joomla, Expression Engine or any other similar package.
2. Is there a lot of maintenance or a wishlist of features?
I have one site that I built for someone on a bespoke CMS. They have this idea that someday they might want more features, but for the most part the site ahs been working fine for them for seven years. I had to fix one bug 2-3 years ago and that was an hour's work. So the site has taken about 1 hour of work in the last four years. Since it's still pretty much working for them, they're sitting tight.
Now, if they wanted to add features or change this and change that, or they were calling me up every month or two to do this or do that, I would probably try to get them to move to Drupal at this point
I also wouldn't say there is no downside at all. Though Drupal has saved me tons of time and I'll never code another bespoke content management system, I do have some reservations about drupal [webmasterworld.com]
Of course, if you are offering services that go beyond serving up information, that's another deal.
[edit: fixed broken link]
[edited by: ergophobe at 11:01 pm (utc) on Oct. 26, 2009]
Your link to reservations about Drupal didn't work - is there a good post about this I should read?
We are actually planning a lot more work on the website integrating more social media stuff, video etc so I think our developers have actually suggested us moving this because it might be better for us as you say. They are doing very well it seems despite the recession. I recently asked them to quote for a whole load of work which they have quoted for but they have given us a cheaper quote to do all this work by moving us to Drupal and doing it rather than building on our current bespoke cms.
The website is not static - there is always some piece of development going on in some area so perhaps Drupal might be good for us.
Of course, I don't know your situation, but from what you say, I think your developers are looking out for your best interests.
Just curious, will your typical user be logged into a personalized account or just visiting anonymously?
Most users will be visiting anonymously but our members will be able to login and hopefully personalize their own accounts.
Drupal may be a good choic but you're right to question it.
To me the sign that they developers are not just blowing smoke is that they say they can redo the site in drupal for less than they can add the features to your existing site.
I ask about anonymous/logged in because this makes a big difference in server load. If it's mostly anon, you can take a lot of load off by creating static cached versions of your pagers with the Boost module.
If you read my thread I (hopefully) correctly linked this time, one of my complaints about drupal is that it can eat resources. Caching helps a lot, but I'd expect higher loads than your custom system.
Ever hear the expression "too many cooks spoil the soup"? Same goes for CMSs.
I personally think that the very best CMS's are the ones that are little known custom work that have been crafted over a long period by businesses. They tend to be very specialized, very efficient, very highly developed and very well done.
We deal in news and media and the Mclatchey news CMS and AHN's Newsbahn are examples of some of the finest applications out there.
I also think that the smartest ones are disconnecting front end (Customer Facing) and backend CMS (content generation functions) using standards based XML for transport between the layers.
We have some enlightened self-interest in the move. Every software producer hopes to turn their custom solution into turnkey software-- to build it once, then sell a million installations. To make the software more attractive, we add a lot of features and configurability.
But to go from software that work well for ten sites to software that works well for a thousand sites pits you against community-sourced projects that are tested on ten thousand sites. In areas where we specialize, we feel our product is superior to any open source substitute. But our clients are increasingly asking for features and capabilities in areas where we don't specialize, and wouldn't want to specialize.
So eventually there will be a tipping point. Our package has top-of-the-line feature A and B, reasonably good features C and D, bells and whistles E and F. But the community-produced alternative offers reasonably good A-C, but bells and whistles D-Q, and experimental functions R-Z, so the client opts to have more options. It may be 5 years from now, but it may be 5 hours from now— content management has already been commoditized, and the community-based projects like Drupal and Joomla are the commodity producers.
We prefer to guide them through that transition and retain our relationship with them, rather than fight it and potentially lose it.
You can sneer and say you don't want to use the lowest common denominator, but it's not as if you're locked in to one way of doing things. This is an important distinction. Drupal is a framework, and if some part of it is insufficient, you can customize that part of the system to your needs, and fall back on the core functionality for lower priority elements.
So, let's say Drupal doesn't have good native functionality for storage of meteorological data. Well, I'd still start with Drupal. That way, we can rely on the framework to provide security, user and roles management, and file handling. All the development resources we used to have to devote to those areas can be assigned 100% to improving the meteorological data handling. Not too long ago sites like Greenpeace UK, Miami.com, and even WhiteHouse.gov would have been deemed too specialized to leave to trust with a community-sourced CMS, but all of them are Drupal sites now.
I think here in London we are slightly behind in moving towards these open source CMS's - I don't know many big sites that are using Drupal yet here. However, it seems like possibly a very good solution for us - I'm meeting internally today to discuss all the issues and will be taking all your comments with me.
Thanks again!
