In responding to one of my earlier posts, Sandy asked why and when to use Drupal. Probably the best answers are those given by Tom Geller in the Lynda.com course “Drupal 7 Essential Training.” On most Lynda courses the first few videos are available even if you don’t have a subscription, so Tom’s answers may be available to anyone who’s interested. I’ll spell out my answers below.

First, to address the question: Drupal versus WordPress? I’ve used and set up blogs on WordPress – it’s about as easy as a content management system could be. It also now offers many options for designing a blog to suit your functional needs. You can put up images and MP3s, and you have a lot of themes to choose from in designing your site. It’s a wonderful way for techno-idiots to put up a blog.

Drupal is NOT wonderful for techno-idiots. However, Sandy is not a techno-idiot, and I don’t think she would have a major problem installing and maintaining a Drupal site. So, the answer for her will be found in other factors.

The first questions you should answer when making this decision is: does your server have the minimum technical requirements, and will your ISP give you server access or help you set up the site? Specifically, for Drupal 7 you need 15 MB of disk space; an Apache 1.3 or 2.x server or a Microsoft ISS server; MySQL 5.0.15 or higher database with PDO, or PostgreSQL 8.3 or higher with PDO; and PHP 5.2.5 or higher (5.3 recommended). If you can’t meet those requirements and are not willing or able to change ISPs, there’s no need to consider Drupal.

Between us Robert and I manage five Drupal sites – now six, including this one. We didn’t choose this CMS, but it was highly recommended for the Kehila Chadasha site by a database-savvy person who understood the group’s need for an ecommerce system that would be secure and trusted. As we learned the system, we decided to use it for our business websites because we wanted the ability to share documents with certain people – in my case with clients, and in his case with other lawyers who do similar kinds of work.

Over the years Robert has added two other sites that he runs for nonprofits he is active in. Between us we now have one blog, two informational business sites with some content restricted to people we have approved for access to it, and three nonprofit membership sites that are updated by teams of people. Two of the nonprofit sites can handle secure ecommerce transactions.

So, in five of our cases we have had several factors tipping the scale toward Drupal:

·        the need for secure ecommerce transactions,

·        the need to restrict access to some content, and

·        the desire have a system that others can learn to update.

For this blog, the Drupal site is definitely overkill. However, I’m also using it to learn and experiment with Drupal 7, so this choice was easy for me.

I don’t hesitate to suggest that someone with Sandy’s technical background could manage a Drupal 7 site. The new interface is much simplified and really very easy to use. I’m still learning, and if you keep visiting this blog you should see the features become more robust over time - including, I hope, the ability to restrict access to content for designated users.

If you have specific questions about whether your site is a good candidate for Drupal, drop me a line. I’m far from an expert, but I do have a few years of Drupal experience and would be happy to help site developers puzzle through this question.