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Out of all the CMSs out there, is Drupal right for you? Here is a general
overview of what Drupal does best, as well some things that are more
appropriate for other website creation systems. First, let's start with Drupal's advantages.
First of all it's somewhere in the middle between ultimate customizability and
the out of the box ease that you get from some content management systems,
that is, you don't have to program everything, but you can do a lot.
Second of all, Drupal has proven insecure, it's been around for several years
and it's been used by thousands of different sites. Although it does
occasionally have security updates it is generally a secure enough system to
use for pretty much anything. Third of all, Drupal has very strong community
support and we will show you little bit of that community support now.
First of all, Drupal has many pieces of software that are available as plug-ins
to the main Drupal program. These are called Modules and they add additional
functionality beyond what the core Drupal program provides. These are divided
into many categories, for example, there are content categories which lets you
display the things that you write and produce in different ways. There are all
sorts of administration plug-ins, which let you change the way that you manage
your site. All the way down to e-Commerce modules which
lets you connect to existing systems you might have for credit cards for
example or PayPal. Another part of the Drupal community is in
its themes, themes let you change the way that your Drupal website looks, and
as you go through this page which is at drupal.org/project/themes, you can see
snapshots of many of the different kinds of pages that you can make your Drupal
website look like. These are all provided by people from outside in the Drupal
community and almost without exception they are available for free.
Thirdly, the Drupal community is very active in talking with itself, so that if
you have any problems with your Drupal installation or after your Drupal
installation you can go in and you can get your answers very quickly for free
from other people who have faced the same problems.
Fourth, Drupal is an open source project, which means it's built by many people
in the community. In this case it's built on two additional open source
projects PHP as the programming language and SQL, which is the database
language. Finally, there are numerous commercial companies
out there supporting Drupal. One of those companies is Lullabot, which
offers workshops and training, writes articles and blog posts that will teach you
more about Drupal and so forth. They also do commercial support for Drupal.
Another commercial support company for Drupal is Acquia. This is a company that
was actually founded by the original person who wrote Drupal.
There are numerous sites out there that are built on Drupal. Some of the
largest ones are The Onion at theonion.com, Amnesty International at amnesty.org and
Popular Science at popsci.com, so you can see a great variety there. The first
one is a humorous magazine, the second one is an international organization and
the third one is a popular magazine that's been around for dozens-and-dozens of
years and has made the move online using Drupal. Now that we have talked about some of the
good things about Drupal, let's talk about some of its disadvantages. First of
all Drupal has greater technical knowledge requirements than you would have
if you were just writing a website by scratch in HTML. You need to have access
to the server and you need to have certain permissions on that server. In addition
that server has to have certain programs already installed, most notably PHP
and SQL database, preferably MySQL and the cron program.
Finally although you don't need to know HTML or any of the other traditional
web skills to customize your Drupal site, it does help to have HTML, CSS and
certain graphics editing skills in order to bring your Drupal site to its full flower.
Drupal has certain design biases. If you go and take a look at sites that are
built under, well, you'll notice the very often there will be a left column and
a right column and a content in center and a header at the top and it tends to
be the same from theme-to-theme. The good news is that all of that can be
customized; the bad news is you may have to do a certain amount of work to make
that customization happen. So when shouldn't you use Drupal? First of
all, if it's going to be overkill, there is no need to use Drupal. A site that
doesn't change much doesn't really need Drupal, because what Drupal is good at
is letting you bring in new information at any time and change what's
already there. Sites that are just plain static sites that
don't have any sort of community interaction don't really need Drupal. You
can build sites like those in Drupal, but you don't need to.
Drupal is also overkilled when you have solid simpler alternatives or once that
are built more specifically to your purpose. For example, there is a Wiki
plug-in, a Wiki module for Drupal, but if you are going to build just a Wiki,
you might as well use MediaWiki, which is built specifically for that purpose.
You shouldn't use Drupal when you don't have the technical help or abilities
that you will need to install and run it, and we will talk more about what you
need to run Drupal throughout the course. Finally you shouldn't use Drupal if it's going
to be an extremely high-traffic or mission-critical site. If it's necessary
to have this site online in order to save lives you should probably use something
else or at least use something else as a backup. If you are going to run
something that's going to have millions and millions and millions of page
views probably Drupal is not the right solution. Although I should mention,
Drupal does run very popular sites. I hope this video has given you a sense of
when Drupal is best for you and when to look for a simpler or more heavy-duty solution.