Is Drupal ready for the enterprise? [closed]

Answer 1

Drupal is used all over the place and has a very large community supporting its development. There is also a large for hire community if you want a custom drupal component.

Answer 2

I've used Drupal to build a combined public-facing site for an organization that also included internal features for employees such as meeting organization and internal document management. Mostly it worked out well and they are happy with it, and very happy not to have to manage two separate sites and / or something like sharepoint.

The one place I found Drupal to be a little lacking is in its LDAP support. You can use it just fine for authentication, but there are some bugs in the modules that try and bring LDAP groups down as roles, if this worked more seamlessly I would be completely on board with the "Drupal is enterprise-ready" sentiment, but it's not there yet.

That said, you can do a lot with content types and taxonomy-based access control to customize what content is available to what roles, something that is a requirement for most intranets.

Answer 3

Drupal is great, but it is very inefficient. But, as I keep telling my frontend developers, this is the payoff for being flexible and highly modular.

We are currently creating a Druapl site, which I consider enterprise (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/161991/what-makes-an-application-an-enterprise-or-enterprise-level-application). It has about 40 content types, 15 user roles, integrated with Ubercart, interfacing with external APIs for membership verification etc. etc. Our development servers struggle some times, but on our staging hosting, it is lightening - fast as any similar sized site.

Make sure any bespoke code is well developed, use Drupal's performance features before release and ensure quality hosting is used.

Answer 4

I recommend against Drupal due to its inefficiency. Yes, it can do almost anything, but it does it slowly. For any but the simplest of sites, drupal will not build nearly as efficient a chain of queries and pages as a custom built site will. Something that can be done by hand with two SQL joins and a single PHP loop is likely to be handled by Drupal with five joins and a nested loop.

That said, I love Drupal and will continue using it in non-enterprise environments, and I cannot recommend any other CMS that does not have similar problems when presented with complex tasks.

Answer 5

I was the lead developer behind the recently relaunched American Diabetes Association - http://forecast.diabetes.org/ - rebuild in Drupal. At launch, we were getting about 250k uniques/month and it's been growing significantly. While the criticism for "inefficient query chains" is mostly accurate, there is a reason for that. The Lazy Loading pattern is used as frequently and often as possible. To streamline the process a bit, you can always configure Drupal's caching, there are some addon modules, and then you could go with something like APC or memcached.

Regardless, the trade off of being easily extended, customized, and - in normally less than an hour - having something to show the customer and allow them to load content, is pretty significant.

Answer 6

Yes, but...

Word of Caution: Many community-based themes are coded sloppily, which completely negates the efforts Drupal has made to make their CMS secure. Worse still, common practice in theme development is to find a theme like the one you want and customize it. Since code of these themes is shared so freely, a single sloppy mistake can affect many other themes derived from it.

If you go with Drupal (or any other stock CMS), don't just hire some joe-shmo designer to theme it for you. If possible, hire one contract for the visual theme and a php developer to actually build the theme from PSD's