Why Drupal for the Content Management System of Choice?

There are a lot of content management systems (CMS) out there, many proprietary and many open source. Here's a list from Wikipedia that has a nice outline of both proprietary and open source CMS solutions. Considering the multitude of choices, why did I choose Drupal for Relish's website and primary recommendation for clients who need a robust CMS solution?

First off, our company primarily develops on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), so that narrowed the choices down a little bit; considering how many PHP content management systems are available. And to keep in line with Relish's development philosophy, I wanted a CMS that was open source so we, or clients, wouldn't incur additional cost overhead, as well as being popular among the open source community and widely used. The latter helps in that the CMS should be actively maintained and patched, should have decent documentation and online support, and gawd forbid, if the client and Relish ever parts, the client has a well-known solution that another party can come in and support with minimal headache; which wouldn't be the case if we custom built our own CMS solution or used a relatively unknown CMS.

So a couple of years ago when we were trying to find and stick to a standard CMS option I chose to try out WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, in that order. I'm not going to go into any technical details on installation, usage training, customization, etc. as all that's documented ad nauseum and can be found from your favorite search engine.

WordPress

Some may see WordPress as just a blogging platform, and it is very good at that. But with the additional plugins one can install, plus the customization one can add to the core functionality if one so wanted, WordPress can perform as a decent CMS that handles more types of content than just blog posts.  For my testing, I set out to create a website with a few sections and some content just to get a sense of the workflow involved. Nothing too fancy. The code base and database setup was straight-forward, and I was able to start creating sections and posting immediately. In regard to theming, there are extensive sites that offer WP themes; some for a cost, others free depending on where you look. I wanted to create my own, custom theme, and basically just copied one of the themes that came with the core installation, renamed it, and tweaked a bunch of CSS and PHP templates to make the output what I wanted. If you're not into CSS or PHP this is probably not for you as it's involved and takes effort in tweaking and testing to get things laid out how you want. 

I went through a few iterations of various sites, structure, themes and some custom modules just for sport. I can't say why I didn't choose WordPress after testing all three, because it's a pretty cool CMS and can do a lot. And I would definitely recommend it to a client if I thought the site they wanted would match WordPress over Drupal; it just depends on a case-by-case basis.

Joomla

Joomla's a popular and robust content management system; if the amount of extensions and themes that are available don't make that obvious, just search for "joomla" and see the number of results. For this test, I wanted to see what it would take to build a website that met some differing requirements for a couple of potential clients. Once the initial MySQL database is setup for a Joomla site, their installation guides you through all the required steps and you're up and running. I must say the administrative interface is very polished and good looking, and the structure of a Joomla site is straight forward: A site has one or more "sections", each section can have one or more "categories", and each category can have one or more "articles". That's pretty much it. Regarding custom theming, I approached it much like WordPress or Drupal; copy a core theme, rename it, and start modifying the extensive CSS classes and necessary PHP template files.

As with my WordPress tests, I went through a couple of various site iterations, themes, experimented with third-party modules, and a custom module or two to see what was involved. I would have stopped with Joomla and called it done for finding a CMS. However, the more I experimented and dug for third-party modules, help, or themes the more I kept running into the "pay before you play" wall. That's fine and dandy, but not what I was expecting or wanting. So still liking Joomla a lot, I went to try out Drupal.

Drupal

Don't know if you've heard, but the US government's White House website is running Drupal, as with a bunch of other big sites. Well the White House migration happened around Oct. '09, and I didn't know about the other sites at time of testing in '08, it was just apparent that Joomla and Drupal were usually being compared to each other from the searches I've done. Using similar methodology with my WordPress and Joomla testing I set out to create a few test sites. Much like WordPress and Joomla, once the Drupal database is created you just have to follow the installation script instructions and you're good to go to creating content.

This is when I realized I was dealing with a different CMS than the other two. First, I finally realized what people were saying about Drupal's administrative interface being ugly; it is ugly, with no pretty icons or design out of the box like Joomla or WordPress has. More on this later, though. Second, there is a decent learning curve on how a Drupal site is structured into "nodes", how one assigns nodes to one or many "taxonomy" terms, and generally how stuff works. I was overwhelmed at first. But then I went to the online community to seek documentation and modules I might need to get things done. The availability of information helped the experience of working with Drupal a lot. Modules are free, and most likely there's a module for whatever you need. Theming is still taxing as there's plenty of CSS and PHP templates one can end up dealing with, but there's readily available "base themes" that you just extend to your own whim; a huge time saver compared to just copying a core theme and altering it. As with most other posts on the web about Drupal, the CCK (content construction kit) and Views modules let you put together whatever content type you need and display it in whatever way you want. In regard to the "ugly" administrative interface; there's plenty of free templates you can use, or just apply the theme you're using on the front-end to the administrative end and you get a seamless administrative experience when editing content and managing the site.

So Why Drupal?

Ha. I bet you're pissed I just didn't just get to the point at the top of this post so you didn't have to read all the above babble. Well, it's you're fault for not scanning the post first. Anyway. I liked all three content management systems. They each have functionality or extensible functionality that make them overlap in many ways. And there's no way I can argue why one is better than the other in a general use-case scenario which we at Relish were approaching our CMS search on; and I have no time for flame wars which you can readily find happening by using your favorite search engine. I think the biggest reason is Relish Studio isn't here to provide clients with cookie-cutter, same'ole same'ole site architecture, functionality and design. Drupal, off the shelf, is bare in design but highly functional / customizable. And from a personal level, it just felt right, whatever that means. 

Lastly, I'd like to add we'd never force one CMS solution on a client, or any CMS solution if the client's needs didn't require it. What type of person / agency would recommend a CMS of any kind for a static portfolio site of a couple of pages? We wouldn't. And if necessary, we'd also recommend WordPress or something else if we thought the client's needs matched better with another CMS than Drupal. 'Cuz that's the type of people we are... open.