This month, AppliedTrust re-launched our web site on the CMS called Drupal. Although the "look and feel" of the site hasn't changed much, this upgrade has been a breakthrough in terms of both performance and manageability. I would give our previous CMS, Joomla, a grade of a B- in comparison to Drupal's solid A. Here are six reasons why Drupal is a great fit for www.appliedtrust.com:
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Performance: In our migration from Joomla to Drupal, we tried to keep as many things constant as possible. We tried to keep our look and feel similar (we didn't kill ourselves to replicate every detail, but it's very close). We are hosting the site on the same server, with the same database and version of PHP. We didn't add or remove any significant functionality. This is definitely not a scientific comparison of Joomla and Drupal performance, but it saved www.appliedtrust.com a full second in load time, which is a 33% reduction and important for our Google ranking. We just love performance tuning and are very excited! (This is data from BrowserMob - the red circles indicate outages during the site cutover).
- The "Boboli" approach to features: Most CMSs are like a frozen pizza - you can usually find one you want, but it's never perfect. The "Boboli" approach is to separate the tasty dough from the toppings - you get exactly what you want. Drupal is pretty much the same; it provides a robust "Drupal Core" with a minimal set of functionality. You can add only the features you want, just like fresh pizza toppings from throughout the grocery store. This is a win for security and performance. Most CMSs and blogging systems include a large bundle of built-in functionality - much more like a frozen pizza.
- Command-line management: Drupal offers a command-line tool called drush. While many administrators will prefer the nice web-based management interface, old UNIX cowboys will find the drush shell super efficient. You can download, install, and enable modules or themes in just two commands! Drush is also useful for scheduling tasks out of cron, and for general troubleshooting and administration.
- Content and menu customization: One of the worse "features" of Joomla is that it imposes a weird relationship between content (web pages) and menu item links. For a web page to be accessible, it has to be linked to a menu. On our old Joomla site, we constantly had to police for cases where duplicate URLs linked to a single page. Drupal, on the other hand, completely decouples content (and URLs) from menus. If you have ever managed Joomla, I am confident you know what I'm talking about!
- Dogmatic architecture and implementation: When I first opened one of Drupal's source code files (it's written in PHP), I was shocked to see more comments than code! This is something every Computer Science 101 professor covers - "comment your code" - but is rarely executed well in practice. The Drupal community follows high quality coding standards, and uses a rigorous peer review process for "the core". As a security professional, I especially love their policy for security vulnerabilities: if the module developers don't start working on important vulnerabilities within a month, the software is removed from the Drupal web site. Can you name a software company that would stop selling their products until an important patch is released? (hint: it's not Sun, Microsoft, Oracle, or Google!)
I should emphasize that this was our experience, and your mileage may vary. AppliedTrust is not a web design firm - we pride ourselves on infrastructure (servers, networks, security, performance, etc.). Still, I am tremendously impressed with Drupal and you are probably making a mistake if you are building a complex web site and haven't considered it. Looking back, since 2001 we have transitioned from static HTML (managed with GoLive), to Joomla, to WordPress (which we continue to use for this blog), to Drupal. Each transition has been a marked improvement, and today, I can't imagine using anything except Drupal (for complex sites) or WordPress (for simple ones). In closing, here is a visual history of AppliedTrust's web platform "evolution": 