Drupal
July 1st, 2006
Continuing my review of the numerous CMS/publishing systems I've chosen to look at Drupal here. The usual installation, admin and other topics are covered as in the previous article (which covered Textpattern, Wordpress and Symphony ) .
This should be consider a "part 2", following on from my previous entry which covered wordpress, textpattern and symphony.
Drupal
Drupal is one CMS that I've never really dabbled with although I've heard it mentioned more and more over the past few months. Although I've not made an actual live site with it I've taken some time to play with it before writing this.
Requirements
A web server capable of executing PHP (Apache 1.3.x/2.0.x or IIS5/6)
PHP 4.3.3+ (PHP5 supported from 4.6 onwards)
PHP XML extension (installed by default)
PHP memory of 8MB for core install
A PHP supported Database Server
MYSQL 3.23.17 or newer
PostgreSQL 7.3 or newer
So it's quite specific about what is required so if you're on inexpensive hosting there's a chance you might not be able to run Drupal, unless your host is quite accommodating and can make the changes needed.
Installation
This is definitely the hardest system thus far to install (though it's still not that hard). It requires the manual editing of a few files to get it going and you have to populate your database with tables manually from a provided template.
This is however made redundant as, quite helpfully, there's a video guide to installing the system available on the Drupal site.
Admin Interface
The Drupal admin interface is certainly not the easiest to use but with time it's possible to navigate around it quite easily. The main reason it's so complicated though is simply because of the huge number of different options that there are and this increases as you add more and more modules.
Extensibility
Hands down this is one of the most extensible systems I've seen! There are "modules" for just about everything you can think of ranging from a forum, translation to other languages, an aggregator and a ping function to let sites know you've updated. All of those i just mentioned are ones that come with Drupal. There are many more available around the web to handle Paypal and that sort of thing.
Themes
This is where I fell flat somewhat. I found it quite hard to get to grips with the way the system puts together it's pages. It is, however, something that with time would be easy to get used to. There are a number of contributed themes available from the Drupal site though and these are increasing all the time.
Performance
This is a very finely tuned system even when you have a myriad of modules installed it has very low overhead. It also has a very nifty caching feature which you can turn on and this lessens database hits and is great for sites which often experience high load. You get to choose the period of time before the cache expires and all in all it's quite nicely done.
Overall
I have to say that Drupal is an excellent system and can be moulded to suit pretty much any site, even community driven with the forum module. Performance is excellent, especially for heavy traffic sites. However all of this comes at a premium which is the slightly harder installation and (to me at least) someone tricky theme engine. However if you can get past that and the slightly crowded admin interface then it's a great system to use.
