Initial sample Drupal sites to look at:
http://leftfield.inf.ed.ac.uk/drupal-6.16/
http://bjorling.inf.ed.ac.uk/
We are currently experimenting with them, so they are not an example of a final site.
Remember we have a Plone DICE site at:
http://wcms.inf.ed.ac.uk/dice
Pros and Cons list
First off the general pros and cons of switching:
Sticking with Plone - Pros:
- Less immediate work
- Already does a lot of what we want out of the box
- Sites already using it
- Site creation reasonably intuitive
Sticking with Plone - Cons:
- Becoming less popular within the University
- Little local community support
Switching to Drupal - Pros:
- Growing support within the Uni - IS, Physics
- Uses better understood technology - PHP MySQL/Postgres
- Local users are requesting it.
- Already in use by inviduals/groups within Informatics - openvce.net
Switching to Drupal - Cons:
- Initial learning curve - though doesn't seem as bad as Plone
- Possibility of porting existing Plone sites.
- Would now be supporting 2 WCMSes
- Publishers already know Plone. Some concepts/terminology in Drupal are different.
- Some modules require a newer PHP than 5.1 (SL5), Drupal 7 requires MySQL 5.0.15 or PostgreSQL 8.3 (for database) and PHP Version 5.2 or higher.
Technical Pros and Cons:
Plone Pros -
- Revision control
- Staging edits/workflow
- flexible, configurable
- robust page linkage functionality
- easy to use (in the simple cases)
Plone Cons -
- Monolithic and opaque data store - data.fs
- Complicated
- Upgrades time-consuming
- Possibly HTTPS caching problems (possibly fixed)
Drupal Pros -
- Lots of additional modules
- Does seem straightforward to modify templates/themes.
- flexible, configurable
Drupal Cons -
- Requires extra packages to provide equivalent Plone functionality (Drupal 7 may improve things)
- Comprehensive investigation of functionality requires more time - eg Cosign auth not tested
- image handling doesn't seem as good as Plone's, perhaps extra modules will help.
- only simple permissions/delegation mechanisms
- upgrades not straightforward, all contributed Third Party modules need to support new version before core is upgraded
- major releases only "when ready", no scheduled timetable.
Additional Drupal Considerations
Workflow - default functionality is minimal - need to look at something better
Authorisation - Can we have the ITO manage /teaching and sysman /systems for example? ("better support for multi-site installations" in Drupal 7)
WYSIWIG editor - tinymce installed - needs further investigation withrespect to images/linking
News items and display - basics can be made to work, need to look for better news content type (or create own with CCK)
Friendly URLs/structure.
images - location, uploading and linking to (although there is "improved image handling, including better support for add-on image
libraries" in Drupal 7)
event - calendar - implementable, but could be better, Events module only "dev" for Drupal 6 (CCK may help here?)
migrating existing content into either
Requirements
Apparently |
CMSMatrix says yes, but we've yet to confirm it for ourselves |
Yes |
We've confirmed this on our test services |
No |
CMSMatrix says no, or we've not been able to confirm it for ourselves |
--
NeilBrown - 07 Sep 2010