Is Drupal ready for the enterprise? [closed]

Answer 1

We use Drupal for the main corporate brochure and community areas of our website at http://www.tableausoftware.com

It has allowed us to add on a multitude of plug-able features and customize UX to meet our needs far beyond what we could do with either a more bare-bones platform like rails or django better suited for apps.

We still have room to grow for performance tuning, but we have millions of hits a year without a problem. We've made use of Solr indexing to improve search and allow faceted integrated search for site content and knowledge base and support forums. Additionally, our team has been empowered to create content and curate the site without development hassles.

Lastly, with recent community focus on tools like Features and Context we've been able to manage more risk free deployment and workflow/environment management in addition to improved site architecture.

Answer 2

For transactional support and other significant scaling improvements consider Pressflow http://fourkitchens.com/pressflow-makes-drupal-scale

Answer 3

Answer One: Yes

• internet_search://"drupal in the enterprise" <- use this exact phrase
• Drupal "Success Stories"
• Student Activities Supports 170 Drupal 6 Sites at Texas A&M

Answer Two: It depends

There are surely some who have concerns about this issue. Drupal's database support and schema have been subject to some scrutiny and criticism over its evolution. That is likely to diminish if some or all of the planned enhancements make it into Drupal 7. This is the one out of your three questions that cannot be easily and definitively answered by searching the internet.

• Drupal 7 Database Plans
• Drupal 7 Database Update

Answer Three:

• Open Source Content Management Systems

Answer Four: (Update: 2010-02-03 11:25:04)

• see also: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1715811

Answer 4

If you will see the list of sites here http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites and here http://www.drupalsites.net/, you will see that Drupal is being used to build small, medium and large scale sites!

Answer 5

I've worked on a Drupal project with about 1 million nodes. We added transactional support and it wasn't too hard. You'll need to patch the core of course but this shouldn't be a major concern for an enterprise application with good support and documentation. I was working as the observing pair programmer on the transactional support. I think it took us about a day.

Edit:

I've been working as a Drupal Developer for a few years now. And recently, I have revised my position on Drupal in relation to best practices and enterprise application.

I don't think Drupal is particularly suited to the Enterprise space because:

• Drupal's testing framework is too cumbersome (a domain specific language would be great)
• There are too many contributed modules of poor quality
• Drupal's content model resides partly in code and partly in the database schema
• Drupal's developer community have become focused on sexy software rather than quality software
• Drupal doesn't have mature developer tools (drush is changing that) or a development environment built in.
• Drupal Development is browser and UI centric.
• The centralized nature of Drupal.org/projects, CVS and Drupal's policy on Contrib Projects inhibits the evolution of individual software projects

Also: The enterprise Drupal Application I was once working on has now been ported into Rails.

Answer 6

Drupal is great. I've used it for several mid-scale community and personal websites, and so far is giving us very good results. I would support the comment pointing at the over-done or even low quality of the templates of many of the website's we've looked at out there, but then, just hire a good coder/designer that does this nicely for you.

As for the memory issues there's tons of articles out there that would help you in tweaking Drupal's database management. There's even a module called Drupal Tweaks that does this automatically for you. Here is an excerpt from its project page:

... provides following functionality:

• Enabling and disabling modules through autocomplete suggestions
• Quick search for the nodes, users, etc. to make some operations
• clear the cache and rebuild permissions from one place or do them both at once

Overall we are quite happy so far with Drupal for quick development of the most varied websites and corporate Intranets.