I've been fiddling on and off with Drupal for the last year or so, so I do have a fairly big basket of pros and cons to share.
Pros:
A lot of useful features are integrated from the ground up, such as RSS (which heidi8 mentioned), comment threading and user management tools. Most of these features are fairly easy to configure for basic use, so they could be set up fairly quickly.
A great, supportive community that's actively developing and improving the system. Asking for help is fairly easy, and so is reporting bugs and problems with modules and themes. It's not perfect, but it does work.
Scalability is taken into consideration. There's a built in throttling function for high traffic situations, and you can improve or change that to your heart'scontent.
It is fairly easy to develop for - the API is really well documented, and since you can modify other's modules and themes as you like, it is easy to steal borrow code from other people and build on their success.
I think you can also save drafts and so on while creating a post or a page with Drupal, which means you can probably use it as a writing tool instead of stuff like MS Word and so on.
Backing up your installation isn't too hard to do even without the modules that streamline it. You basically back up the actual folders on the webserver AND back up the database or databases that the installation uses. Upgrading Drupal is something I've never done, but it usually involves a similar sort of process as many other CMSes do- you switch off the modules you added, back up your database and general installation, and run an upgrade script.
Now, for the cons:
Sometimes, the documentation for Drupal is just not as complete or effective as it should be.
The amount of modules and themes and add-ons available for Drupal necessarily means that they duplicate each other's functions or conflict with each other in strange ways. There is a lot under the hood in Drupal from the get-go, and modding it means that it can break in unpredictable ways.
It can be really frustrating trying to modify or fix parts of Drupal to your desires if you don't have some CSS, PHP or HTML experience. Setting up cron jobs alone nearly broke me when I realised my current website provider wouldn't allow me to do it the way defined by the Drupal manual. Experienced PHP/HTML/CSS programmers will be a must, just to cut back on frustration caused by cluelessness about those languages.
Their taxonomy feature is both wonderful and terrible. Configuring that to work like the mishmash of del.icio.us and LJ will take some serious thinking and planning, especially if the archive won't just use a tag soup of some sort. Some underlying structure is needed, and it can be confusing to marry that with everything else. The modules provided to help that process along are not the most user-friendly around, so it adds to the frustration.
Jesus christ, the submission forms! If you want people to be able to tag and categorise stuff as it is posted, you have two choices: go with the fairly ugly Drupal way of categorising things, or try to put your own together. This was another of the things that finally drove me away from Drupal, as I believe submission forms should be as user-friendly as possible, and it was just so difficult for me to get incremental improvements to show up. Getting to that would take some time.
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Pros:
- A lot of useful features are integrated from the ground up, such as RSS (which
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heidi8 mentioned), comment threading and user management tools. Most of these features are fairly easy to configure for basic use, so they could be set up fairly quickly.
- A great, supportive community that's actively developing and improving the system. Asking for help is fairly easy, and so is reporting bugs and problems with modules and themes. It's not perfect, but it does work.
- Scalability is taken into consideration. There's a built in throttling function for high traffic situations, and you can improve or change that to your heart'scontent.
- It is fairly easy to develop for - the API is really well documented, and since you can modify other's modules and themes as you like, it is easy to
- I think you can also save drafts and so on while creating a post or a page with Drupal, which means you can probably use it as a writing tool instead of stuff like MS Word and so on.
- Backing up your installation isn't too hard to do even without the modules that streamline it. You basically back up the actual folders on the webserver AND back up the database or databases that the installation uses. Upgrading Drupal is something I've never done, but it usually involves a similar sort of process as many other CMSes do- you switch off the modules you added, back up your database and general installation, and run an upgrade script.
Now, for the cons:stealborrow code from other people and build on their success.- Sometimes, the documentation for Drupal is just not as complete or effective as it should be.
- The amount of modules and themes and add-ons available for Drupal necessarily means that they duplicate each other's functions or conflict with each other in strange ways. There is a lot under the hood in Drupal from the get-go, and modding it means that it can break in unpredictable ways.
- It can be really frustrating trying to modify or fix parts of Drupal to your desires if you don't have some CSS, PHP or HTML experience. Setting up cron jobs alone nearly broke me when I realised my current website provider wouldn't allow me to do it the way defined by the Drupal manual. Experienced PHP/HTML/CSS programmers will be a must, just to cut back on frustration caused by cluelessness about those languages.
- Their taxonomy feature is both wonderful and terrible. Configuring that to work like the mishmash of del.icio.us and LJ will take some serious thinking and planning, especially if the archive won't just use a tag soup of some sort. Some underlying structure is needed, and it can be confusing to marry that with everything else. The modules provided to help that process along are not the most user-friendly around, so it adds to the frustration.
- Jesus christ, the submission forms! If you want people to be able to tag and categorise stuff as it is posted, you have two choices: go with the fairly ugly Drupal way of categorising things, or try to put your own together. This was another of the things that finally drove me away from Drupal, as I believe submission forms should be as user-friendly as possible, and it was just so difficult for me to get incremental improvements to show up. Getting to that would take some time.
(Continued in next comment)