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I've used drupal quite a bit, and other frameworks and languages. My impressions: THE GOOD: Drupal is great for rapid prototyping. It is the best CRM to use wh

I've used drupal quite a bit, and other frameworks and languages. My impressions: THE GOOD: Drupal is great for rapid prototyping. It is the best CRM to use when you need flexibility in the core system. Have multiple types of "content objects" that you need to display and act differently within the confines of a single CRM? Want javascript markup in the titles of SOME kinds of content and not others? Selective preprocessing? THE BAD: Drupal can be hell-on-earth when it comes to getting multiple modules working consistently. Expect "audio" attachments to work the same way as "video" attachments using the two modules? Forget it. If a project requires A LOT of modules you haven't coded to work happily together avoid drupal because you WILL have trouble and won't know how to fix it. And smooth upgrading is not really going to happen if you have to customize your site (which would be the reason to use Drupal in the first place). The good outweigh the bad for sites that you want to get up-and-running, or evolve iteratively from a quick start. If you need something that is tremendously polished with easy javascript integration go with Ruby.

christefano 19y ago
I'm sorry to say it but you don't sound like someone who has used Drupal for long at all. First, Drupal isn't a CRM. It's a framework that includes a CMS. For a great CRM that integrates with Drupal, take a look at CiviCRM (http://civicrm.org http://civicrm.org). Second, what you say about making modules work consistently doesn't make sense to me, at least not as you describe it. Drupal can be hell on earth sometimes, but it's the job of the developer to decide which third-party modules fit the needs of the project and what needs to be written from scratch. Besides, audio and video attachments are usually wrapped in a Flash player and that depends very little on what module you use. It also seems that you aren't aware of the best practice (http://drupal.org/best-practices http://drupal.org/best-practices) of not modifying Drupal's core files in order to "customize" your site. Of course modifying Drupal will make it hard to upgrade! Instead of creating a somewhat versionless fork of Drupal you should be using custom modules or PHPtemplate overrides to achieve the functionality you want.

christefano 19y ago

I'm sorry to say it but you don't sound like someone who has used Drupal for long at all. First, Drupal isn't a CRM. It's a framework that includes a CMS. For a great CRM that integrates with Drupal, take a look at CiviCRM (http://civicrm.org http://civicrm.org). Second, what you say about making modules work consistently doesn't make sense to me, at least not as you describe it. Drupal can be hell on earth sometimes, but it's the job of the developer to decide which third-party modules fit the needs of the project and what needs to be written from scratch. Besides, audio and video attachments are usually wrapped in a Flash player and that depends very little on what module you use. It also seems that you aren't aware of the best practice (http://drupal.org/best-practices http://drupal.org/best-practices) of not modifying Drupal's core files in order to "customize" your site. Of course modifying Drupal will make it hard to upgrade! Instead of creating a somewhat versionless fork of Drupal you should be using custom modules or PHPtemplate overrides to achieve the functionality you want.