Drupal Myths

Open source has risky third party integrations.

A robust WCM system involves adding functionality from third parties such as analytics, ad servers, email newsletters, legacy systems and more. Selecting from the wide range of partners providing services and integrating them into a system can be a time consuming and risky business.

Busted

Drupal supports open, API-based integration with any system that supports the same for it's data access. Because Drupal has been deployed multiple hundreds of thousands of times, these integration points have been tested to a far greater extent than any proprietary system on the market.

Open source solutions' upgrades are expensive or infrequent.

Today’s Web businesses need to constantly evolve to survive. While open source technology is continually changing, choosing and maintaining a single distribution is a time consuming and risky business, especially since open source APIs often change with each rev. In-house teams focused on maintenance can miss technological advances, while constantly turning to agencies for support quickly becomes astronomically expensive.

Busted

Drupal has a very solid, public roadmap around major revisions, and best practices for upgrading between major releases. In addition, the very nature of open source software and its communities fosters innovation. They are often far ahead of proprietary competitors in providing cutting-edge technological advances into the very latest technologies. For example, Drupal was the first CMS to offer RSS feeds by default and Drupal 7 will be the first to offer RDFa as a core technology.

Finding employees to manage your Drupal website is hard due to unknown skill set availability.

Finding employees with the latest skills in open source programming can be very expensive—and in some geographic locations almost impossible. Agencies offer expertise at a high price. Paying to find and relocate staff can be prohibitive.

Busted

There are thousands of firms located all over the world that have exceptional experience in creating and modifying Drupal sites. IT professionals with LAMP experience as well as programmers of other languages and systems (Java et al) can easily get the hang of Drupal and PHP and become valuable assets to your project.

Open source solutions have unknown implementation schedules.

Juggling a variety of vendors and in-house staff can result in costly schedule slippages. If you’re doing it yourself, make sure to include time for recruiting, hiring and onboarding skilled developers, as well as for thorough QA before launch.

Busted

In terms of implementation, there is no difference between open source or proprietary software products. Access to experienced technical resources, product architecture, and the complexity of technical requirements are the key drivers of the success of any software implementation project. Effective project managers is critical to identify project milestones and lead technical resources to hit those milestones according to predictable, agreed upon timelines with business stakeholders.

MYTH: Drupal has clunky LDAP integration.

Busted

The LDAP Integration module (http://drupal.org/project/ldap_integration) provides three very nice features: 1) Authentication, which allows you to log in using your LDAP information 2) Groups, gives you roles according to your LDAP groups 3) Data, which allows you to read and write access to LDAP data.

MYTH: Drupal doesn’t provide true means by which to ban a user from the system

Assuming things get out of hand and you have specific users abusing the system, Drupal doesn’t provide true means by which to ban a user from the system.

Busted

Drupal comes out of the box, packed with a very powerful user role and permissions system, as well as the option to block specific users.

Pages

Subscribe to Drupal Myths RSS

See other Drupal sites in action

Drupal site of the day: Pastebot

An excellent example of a Drupal site for a software company that produces a clipboard manager that stores text & images copied from your iPhone/iPod Touch.