I use it professionally for a few sites (one of which is relatively large with an integrated online store). I agree with the statements of it’s hard to learn, hard to back up, and pretty powerful. I don’t love it, but its what was in place when I came into the company so there we are. I’ll add two things:
[LIST=2]
[li]If you want a mobile version of your site Drupal is a bad choice. There does not seem to be a module out there that handles that well. [/li][li]that if you need to do a lot of image management there doesn’t seem to be a decent module for that either. Actually, expand that to document management too… [/LIST][/li]
If someone knows of modules for either one of these issues that I should check out please let me know!
What exactly do you refer to when you call it “powerful”? (“You” is whomever can answer the question)
Dr. Righteous, can you be more specific about “image management”? My actual plan was to integrate Coppermine into Drupal, which I’ve already tested so I know it can be done, someone wrote a bridge thing. (I chose coppermine for one very specific reason: True Boolean Search on image metadata - it seems to be the most reliable gallery program out there that can do that, and do it with huge numbers of images, I have around 60,000 to start, growing all the time. The fact that this is so hard to find amazes me, since I was under the impression that boolean search is pretty well-established stuff, as is metadata collection, so the fact that combining the two has proven ridiculously difficult is confounding.)
“Flexible” is one of the things I was after… it is very important to me NOT to end up looking like every other website looks these days. This march of uniformity is driving me crazy. Every site is turning into a Wordpress blog. My research tells me that Drupal is very adaptable in this respect.
Hard to back up?? That’s certainly alarming. But my server setup is dual drive, mirrored. That’s pretty backy-uppy. And my intention was to do as I do now, and keep a copy on my own computer.
For example - a few minutes ago I wanted to replace an image. I could upload the new image but I couldn’t delete the old one through that interface - it ends up adding a _0 to the name of your file rather than asking you if you want to delete the old one or overwrite it. I could FTP in and delete the old file first, of course, but this is one of many shortcomings in the file management area.
I’m not the site administrator, so I’m not sure what all is out there as far as modules for this. I do know they swapped out the old module we were using earlier this week… this one allows me to give images space around it (horizontal or vertical) which is an improvement, but still can’t allow captioning. I think the old one was FCK Editor, not sure which this one is.
I played around with Drupal and did not like it. Too complicated. I like using WordPress as a CMS, and I find it’s easier to design custom themes in WP.
Here is a site I just finished a couple of days ago that runs on WP.
With a few modules (mainly CCK and Views) you can create nearly any type of content and display it in a lot of different ways without having to write a single line of code (well, most of the time). There are a lot of modules available for all kinds of purposes.
I used Coppermine some years ago, didn’t like it much. There were some pretty annoying technical things, but it was also the most hostile community I ever encountered on any open source project.
I also distrust bridges that are not supported by some core developers (I don’t know how it is with this one), if one of the two projects makes changes, odds are the bridging will break at some point. The Coppermine-Joomla bridge was essentially abandonded for some time, which was one of the reasons I moved to Drupal (without any extra gallery software).
If you only need to share users, bridging is probably the easiest way. If you need tighter integration I would check if your demands could be met by a Drupal-only solution. You can create very flexible galleries using CCK Imagefield and Imagecache. Maybe the search is covered by some Drupal Search module.
You can do pretty much anything with theming, starting with a base theme like Zen is strongly recommended.
RAID is no backup, and you can backup Drupal easily by backing up the whole Drupal folder and dumping the database. What is difficult is making changes on a dev server and integrating them into a production server because a lot of configuration is in the database. There are ways around it, but it could be easier.
Drupal is hard to learn, but it is also a lot more powerful than the “easier” CMS.