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To people using Drupal in production: can you share what you consider to be the sweet spot for using Drupal? Also, are you mostly using existing components, or

To people using Drupal in production: can you share what you consider to be the sweet spot for using Drupal? Also, are you mostly using existing components, or leaning more toward custom development?

ksenzee 11y ago
I mostly use existing components, because they're there and (usually) of high quality and integrate well together. But on a project of any size you'll need custom development. If your project is so small you don't need any custom development, you might have been happier with a simpler CMS in the first place. I've always liked the description of Drupal as a content management framework.
- thibaut_barrere 11y ago
  Thanks for your input, appreciated! A bit of custom isn't a problem (I'm used to do everything custom usually!), but it's good to know there are truly useful existing components which can play well together.
  - ksenzee 11y ago
    Yes indeed. There are so many existing useful components that there's a whole section of the Programmer's Guide to Drupal [0] called "Common Drupal Programming Mistakes: Programming Too Much." Almost all the Drupal code I write is either integration or patches to existing projects. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027799.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027799.do
donutdan4114 11y ago
I've worked on many Drupal sites, and I would say the sweet spot is a client who is going to budget $10k+. Basically, under $10k budget means you should be looking at simpler, pre-baked solutions, like Wordpress, Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, static HTML, etc.. I've worked on Drupal projects from $25-250k+, and it can handle pretty much everything (sometimes requiring a lot of TLC tho). There are so many contributed modules that can help build things out, but I always need some type of customizations requiring (usually a few) custom modules per project. It all depends... I did one project that had dozens of crazy features that we broke out into 70+ custom modules... But yea, I would say the sweet spot is a customer who needs a pretty large site with a lot of functionality. My 2 cents anyway.
- thibaut_barrere 11y ago
  This is some very useful insight, thanks! I've been asking this since at times, fully custom development (I ship Rails apps mostly, since 2005) is not the way to go, so I'm looking for other options where using modules (either custom or purchased) could help.
  - donutdan4114 11y ago
    I would recommend for larger-type websites, and not so much for performance-based applications. However, ignoring my own advice, we did build a todo list app powered by Drupal & React.js and it works pretty well: http://www.135list.com http://www.135list.com You can literally build anything in Drupal, although I'm not sure you should...
  - ohthehugemanate 11y ago
    I would suggest you consider drupal as a basis for your fully custom sites. You start out of the box with a well supported, standards based system for the basics: user management/authentication, data modeling/storage/query, routing, path handling, HTML templating etc etc. It has a huge ecosystem of modules, also effectively out of the box, for third party integrations and all sorts of esoteric requirements. So you start writing your custom code on an established base with a strong API for modification and integration, which means less custom code to support. In a Drupal custom module you can do or change literally anything, and you can write whatever architecture you like for your individual component. You just have to integrate with the Symfony2 router and dependency injection container. Pretty cool stuff.
    - thibaut_barrere 11y ago
      Great - thanks everyone for your replies! This looks interesting indeed. May I ask what is your preferred way to learn Drupal for a total newcomer, albeit a truly seasoned developer?
      - Albright 11y ago
timdorr 11y ago
Legos - Custom built web app Duplos - Drupal, fully customized with some coding Pre-Built Toy - SquareSpace, Wix, even Wordpress to a certain extent It's a nice middle ground when you need something more custom than Wordpress and others can provide, but don't want to build everything from scratch.
- thibaut_barrere 11y ago
  Neat. Thanks for the metaphor, looks clear now :-)
Ecio78 11y ago
I used Drupal (6 and 7) in a small bank (80/100 internal users, 500+ financial advisors), building the external public site and also a an internal site used mainly to share documents, modules, faq etc.. with the network of advisors. It replaced a commercial solution bringing more clarity (but that was also thanks to stricter rules in place defining types of docs, fields etc..), better graphic appeal (but just because the previous one was really crap) and also great search experience thanks to Apache Solr. As I am a sysadmin, not a developer, I used all built-in modules except one that I modified in order to integrate the authentication with another business system via webservices (only code I developed). As I am also not a graphic, I worked with an external one (that prepared design in PSP so it was a bit a pain to convert it to template) At that time (2009 I think) I reviewed few other options (WP, ezPublish, plone) but I chose Drupal because the authorisation system with roles etc.. was much more powerful than WP one.
zappo2938 11y ago
I'm building with Angularjs and Express right now coming from a Drupal experience. At every turn I'm looking to Drupal and Drupal contributed modules to solve problems, for example, media asset management. If I had to to solve for internationalization, document versioning control, publishing workflow, publishing workflow with versioning control (lol), integration with a full-text search engine, micro data markup, and several other common problems, I would start with Drupal which also provides a fully functioning REST server that integrates with all these things seamlessly. That is the miraculous part, the seamless integration. It is plug and play, but sometimes I have to open up the insides and write 'glue code' to bridge the different components. Also, I have to export configuration from the database into code which is possible. I'm talking Drupal 7. Can't wait till I get a Drupal 8 project.

To people using Drupal in production: can you share what you consider to be the sweet spot for using Drupal? Also, are you mostly using existing components, or leaning more toward custom development?

ksenzee 11y ago

I mostly use existing components, because they're there and (usually) of high quality and integrate well together. But on a project of any size you'll need custom development. If your project is so small you don't need any custom development, you might have been happier with a simpler CMS in the first place. I've always liked the description of Drupal as a content management framework.

thibaut_barrere 11y ago
Thanks for your input, appreciated! A bit of custom isn't a problem (I'm used to do everything custom usually!), but it's good to know there are truly useful existing components which can play well together.
- ksenzee 11y ago
  Yes indeed. There are so many existing useful components that there's a whole section of the Programmer's Guide to Drupal [0] called "Common Drupal Programming Mistakes: Programming Too Much." Almost all the Drupal code I write is either integration or patches to existing projects. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027799.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027799.do

donutdan4114 11y ago

I've worked on many Drupal sites, and I would say the sweet spot is a client who is going to budget $10k+. Basically, under $10k budget means you should be looking at simpler, pre-baked solutions, like Wordpress, Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, static HTML, etc.. I've worked on Drupal projects from $25-250k+, and it can handle pretty much everything (sometimes requiring a lot of TLC tho). There are so many contributed modules that can help build things out, but I always need some type of customizations requiring (usually a few) custom modules per project. It all depends... I did one project that had dozens of crazy features that we broke out into 70+ custom modules... But yea, I would say the sweet spot is a customer who needs a pretty large site with a lot of functionality. My 2 cents anyway.

thibaut_barrere 11y ago
This is some very useful insight, thanks! I've been asking this since at times, fully custom development (I ship Rails apps mostly, since 2005) is not the way to go, so I'm looking for other options where using modules (either custom or purchased) could help.
- donutdan4114 11y ago
  I would recommend for larger-type websites, and not so much for performance-based applications. However, ignoring my own advice, we did build a todo list app powered by Drupal & React.js and it works pretty well: http://www.135list.com http://www.135list.com You can literally build anything in Drupal, although I'm not sure you should...
- ohthehugemanate 11y ago
  I would suggest you consider drupal as a basis for your fully custom sites. You start out of the box with a well supported, standards based system for the basics: user management/authentication, data modeling/storage/query, routing, path handling, HTML templating etc etc. It has a huge ecosystem of modules, also effectively out of the box, for third party integrations and all sorts of esoteric requirements. So you start writing your custom code on an established base with a strong API for modification and integration, which means less custom code to support. In a Drupal custom module you can do or change literally anything, and you can write whatever architecture you like for your individual component. You just have to integrate with the Symfony2 router and dependency injection container. Pretty cool stuff.
  - thibaut_barrere 11y ago
    Great - thanks everyone for your replies! This looks interesting indeed. May I ask what is your preferred way to learn Drupal for a total newcomer, albeit a truly seasoned developer?
    - Albright 11y ago

timdorr 11y ago

Legos - Custom built web app Duplos - Drupal, fully customized with some coding Pre-Built Toy - SquareSpace, Wix, even Wordpress to a certain extent It's a nice middle ground when you need something more custom than Wordpress and others can provide, but don't want to build everything from scratch.

thibaut_barrere 11y ago
Neat. Thanks for the metaphor, looks clear now :-)

Ecio78 11y ago

I used Drupal (6 and 7) in a small bank (80/100 internal users, 500+ financial advisors), building the external public site and also a an internal site used mainly to share documents, modules, faq etc.. with the network of advisors. It replaced a commercial solution bringing more clarity (but that was also thanks to stricter rules in place defining types of docs, fields etc..), better graphic appeal (but just because the previous one was really crap) and also great search experience thanks to Apache Solr. As I am a sysadmin, not a developer, I used all built-in modules except one that I modified in order to integrate the authentication with another business system via webservices (only code I developed). As I am also not a graphic, I worked with an external one (that prepared design in PSP so it was a bit a pain to convert it to template) At that time (2009 I think) I reviewed few other options (WP, ezPublish, plone) but I chose Drupal because the authorisation system with roles etc.. was much more powerful than WP one.

zappo2938 11y ago

I'm building with Angularjs and Express right now coming from a Drupal experience. At every turn I'm looking to Drupal and Drupal contributed modules to solve problems, for example, media asset management. If I had to to solve for internationalization, document versioning control, publishing workflow, publishing workflow with versioning control (lol), integration with a full-text search engine, micro data markup, and several other common problems, I would start with Drupal which also provides a fully functioning REST server that integrates with all these things seamlessly. That is the miraculous part, the seamless integration. It is plug and play, but sometimes I have to open up the insides and write 'glue code' to bridge the different components. Also, I have to export configuration from the database into code which is possible. I'm talking Drupal 7. Can't wait till I get a Drupal 8 project.