Is Drupal ready for the enterprise?

I too have issues with Drupal's slowness, but it seems that with top notch developers you can get around it.

It's a moderately difficult tool to make a company website with, its a very difficult tool to make an enterprise-application with. But when it comes to open source LAMP CMS's, there is no real competitor.

**Answer One: Yes**

- internet_search://"drupal in the enterprise" <- use this exact phrase
- [Drupal "Success Stories"](

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- [Student Activities Supports 170 Drupal 6 Sites at Texas A&M](

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**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](

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- [Drupal 7 Database Update](

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**Answer Three:**

- [Open Source Content Management Systems](

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

- see also:

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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.

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 (

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). 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.

We use Drupal for the main corporate brochure and community areas of our website at

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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.

If you will see the list of sites here

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and here

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, you will see that Drupal is being used to build small, medium and large scale sites!

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][1]** 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.


[1]:

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