We can hear anywhere that Drupal is a CMS, good for anyone, anyone can use it easily to build a website. Unfortunately, that’s not correct.

Why can I say that?

This is my experience from 20 years coding as a programmer, 13 years working as a Web Developer on many platforms, 9 years working as a Drupal Developer; making more than 100 projects done for many clients around the world with different business types for both new projects and existing projects from other development companies; working with many developers from fresher to senior, architect, director; training many Drupal developers, supporting them to finish the projects after the years.

Drupal is a truly wonderful platform with many robust features. It is designed to combine many separated concepts, put and control them together to build a website/application easily by the developers who understand Drupal enough and correctly.

To build a website/application by WordPress, Magento, we need to learn how to use WordPress, Magento, follow it and we’ll have a website for that purpose. In the worst case, we still have a basic result. For example, with WordPress, it is a presentation website, blog website, landing page; with Magento, it is an ecommerce website.

However Drupal is totally different. It’s not really a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, Magento. Someone calls Drupal as a CMF (Content Management Framework), but that’s not really true either. Drupal is actually a Framework in the skin of a CMS. That’s an advantage but that’s also a big disadvantage for anyone, event developers.

Let me write here briefly about the difference between CMS and Framework in my experience and opinion:

  • Technical concept:
    • CMS is a built-in system allowing any users, not only for developers to build a website quickly based on what the CMS has, and manage content directly on what the CMS provides.
    • Framework is a library of the functions, only useful for developers, who can build any websites/applications from those functions, based on their development level and skills.
  • Target users:
    • CMS:
      • Any users
      • With the built-in features, any user can use, no need too much knowledge of development, surely developers can use it easily,
      • With the in of the box customization: only developers can do it, based on the CMS standard, the customization shouldn't be too complicated, otherwise, it’s become a terrible task.
      • With the out of the box customization: this is always the problem for using CMS. In many cases, the developers must solve separately, differently from the CMS architecture, it’s much more tiresome than coding from pure programming language.
    • Framework:
      • Only for developers
      • The Junior developers can follow the standard to build a simple website/application. They can also follow the standard and the guideline to solve task by task what they're assigned in a big project under a Technical Architect.
      • The Senior developers can do any customization, creative, out of the box features based on their understanding of that Framework, still under a Technical Architect.
      • The Principal Developer or Technical Architect with high knowledge/skill/experience of system design, architect design can use Framework to build anything they need to solve any complicated system they have to do.
  • One question: can a non-developer-user use Framework? Very easy to answer: No. They totally can not use it.
  • Another question: Can a non-developer-user or non-Drupal-user or a weak-understanding-Drupal-user use Drupal? Let me continue to discuss below before answering it.

When do you choose WordPress for your website?

  • You need a blog, a landing page, a presentation website,
  • You can use some special plugin like WooCommerce to build the special business type,
  • You need a website without too much customization,
  • You need a website without adding more features in the future,
  • You want to have a quick website, you found a theme exactly what you need and you just setup and go live,
  • You can self-learn to handle or you can find a WordPress Developer to do,
  • You’re not a developer, but you want to build a small website for your business, just to present, introduce your business.
  • Surely, a good WordPress developer can do many things with WordPress.

When you choose a Magento for your ecommerce website?

  • You need an ecommerce website,
  • You should be a developer or you need a Magento developer to help you customize what you need, otherwise, you will not succeed.

When you choose a Framework like Symfony, Laravel, Zend, … for your website/application project?

  • You must be a developer first
  • If you’re the person who take responsible for make that project done, you must be a technical architect or a high level/high experience about that Framework,
  • You understand about the project, and your knowledge and skill can give you enough solution to solve that project by that Framework,
  • You have confidence that you can use that Framework to solve all problems for that project.

When you choose Drupal for a project?

  • You can find many information about the advantages and disadvantages of Drupal from the internet, so I won't rewrite it. I only share here what I understood from my real experiences:
  • Advantages of Drupal:
    • Drupal is built as a CMS, but it’s much more flexible and scalable to customize, so first Drupal can build any website as a CMS, but further than a CMS, Drupal is not limited: from landing pages, listing, real estate, ecommerce, B2B, B2C, C2C, CRM, ERP, POS, Elearning, Government, ...
    • Drupal provides a robust architecture like a Framework to build, customize anything a Framework can, any extend features, out of the box features can be built and plug to Drupal website/application easily as a module/theme/extend.
    • On comparing Frameworks, with Drupal standard development approach, it is easy to see that Drupal is faster compared to any Frameworks on developing a full website/application.
    • On comparing CMS, many people easily misunderstand that Drupal is more complicated than WordPress, so that developing a website Drupal is longer than WordPress. However, that is a big misunderstanding about Drupal. Let me compare:
      • For the quick/small website, for the same level developers in Drupal & WordPress, Drupal is equal to WordPress with both developing from scratch or theming approach.
      • For the medium complex of website/application, long lasting projects, Drupal is much better than WordPress because of its architecture.
      • For a big application, WordPress is impossible to use, but Drupal can be used like a Framework.
    • If we build a Drupal website on the standard approach, best practice way, starting as a small website, by that time, we can plug more features, develop more new features, add more new content, integrate more new services, … Drupal is still great and easy to handle.
    • Someone can be worried about Drupal updates continuously, Drupal 6, Drupal 7.1, 7.2, … 7.9, .., Drupal 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, ... , 8.9, … , Drupal 9, … But if you understand it deeply, you will like Dries' mindset. At the time Drupal was not perfect, he wanted to improve without the limitation of the old/bad things from the previous version or any problems from backward compatibility. However, now we’re in stable stage of Drupal, Drupal 8 and 9 are the same, its architecture is almost perfect already, moving from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 is quite simple, and in the future, Drupal is more improved in detailed to support all projects better.
    • Many more strengths of Drupal we can search and read from the internet about.
    • So, when you need to have a website/application, Drupal can do, your business type is not the worry for Drupal. You only need to worry about “Who will build it for you?”. You need to find the right Drupal Developers or Drupal Company.
  • Disadvantages of Drupal
    • Each page in Drupal is created by the combination of many concepts: modules, themes, config, entity, node, taxonomy, region, blog, field, form, display, display mode, views, view format, field group, header, footer, js, css, … Everyone can believe they can understand Drupal, but not too many developers can really understand Drupal. They need to understand concepts correctly first, need to be trained correctly, need to try with the real projects with the correct approach to really understand how is the best to use Drupal most effectively.
    • We can create Drupal websites by anyway, but to make it go furthest, most easy to maintain, addable on more features, to use it for a very long time, it needs a high level of architecture like a Framework.
    • If you are not a Drupal developer, nor you don’t want to learn Drupal seriously, please carefully on using Drupal to build the website except when your website is exactly a Drupal theme you found, but on that best case, you still need to have a good Drupal developer to help you when you need.
  • Don’t ask “can Drupal do this? can Drupal do that?” Because all those questions have the same answers "Yes, Drupal can do". However, who can do that is the most important, not only Drupal but also any other platform. Humans are the most important, humans can do anything, a platform is just a tool, humans builts the tool, not the versus.

In summary: Drupal is a wonderful platform, but how and who can use it to build a complete website/application is not simple. Non-developer can’t. Normal developers can’t. You need a Drupal developer, a good Drupal developer does that for you.

Drupal is only able to become a user wide platform like WordPress when we have a good Robot in the middle layer to convert from Humans actions to Framework logics. That is a longer story, Drupal community is still trying to solve, I am also trying to solve it in my own game "SIBU.AI"

#drupal#website#application
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