A few questions regarding your experience with Drupal CMS

[Sweeney Bill C]

Hello,

My name is Bill Sweeney and I'm a Digital Developer for State of Oregon, Legislative Administration Information Services.  We're in the process of transitioning Oregon's Legislative Website from a mostly static site to a site utilizing a Web Content Management System.   We're considering using the open source Drupal solution for this purpose.  I understand that you are currently using Drupal as your WCMS, and I’m hoping you would be willing to share some information regarding your experience with this system.  Among our requirements is need to allow content contributors, legislators mainly, the ability to maintain their respective content.  Any information you could offer would be helpful!

 

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.  Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

Best Regards, -Bill Sweeney

 

1.       What version of Drupal are you currently using?

2.       How long have you used Drupal?

3.       What other software did you explore and what made you choose Drupal over the others?

4.       How do you currently use Drupal?

5.       In retrospect, would you choose Drupal for this purpose again?

6.       What features stand out as Drupal's strengths and weakness?

7.       Have you ever used other Web Content Management Systems (WCMS)? If so, why did you change to Drupal?

8.       What is the level of acceptance from your content contributors regarding Drupal's ease of use?

 

 

___________________________________________________

Bill Sweeney, Digital Communications Developer

Information Services, Legislative Administration
bill.c....@state.or.us

503-986-1211

 

[Sheldon Rampton]

I emailed this response to Bill Sweeney a couple of days ago, but for
some reason my response didn't get posted to this group, so I'm
reposting it.
--Sheldon Rampton

On Nov 15, 2011, at 12:47 PM, Sweeney Bill C wrote:
> Hello,
> My name is Bill Sweeney and I'm a Digital Developer for State of Oregon, Legislative Administration Information Services.  We're in the process of transitioning Oregon's Legislative Website from a mostly static site to a site utilizing a Web Content Management System.   We're considering using the open source Drupal solution for this purpose.  I understand that you are currently using Drupal as your WCMS, and I'm hoping you would be willing to share some information regarding your experience with this system.  Among our requirements is need to allow content contributors, legislators mainly, the ability to maintain their respective content.  Any information you could offer would be helpful!
>
> Thank you very much for your time and consideration.  Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.
> Best Regards, -Bill Sweeney
>
> 1.       What version of Drupal are you currently using?

Drupal 6.20.

> 2.       How long have you used Drupal?

Personally I have worked with Drupal since 2005. The New York State
Senate started using Drupal for its website in 2008.

> 3.       What other software did you explore and what made you choose Drupal over the others?

I was not on staff at the Senate at the time the decision was made to
adopt Drupal, so I'm not sure what other options they considered.
Previously the Senate had a static HTML website.

> 4.       How do you currently use Drupal?

We use Drupal to host NYSenate.gov and also to host an internal
website for each of the state's 62 state senators that uses CiviCRM to
provide constituent case tracking.

> 5.       In retrospect, would you choose Drupal for this purpose again?

Yes, definitely.

> 6.       What features stand out as Drupal's strengths and weakness?

Drupal is a robust CMS with thousands of available modules that can be
used to add functionality with little or no custom programming. We've
used contributed Drupal modules, for example, to create the Senate's
calendar, video and photo galleries for each senator, live streaming
video of senate meetings, custom sections for senate initiatives,
committee meetings, and also to provide an API through which other
websites and mobile phone apps can retrieve structured data from our
site (e.g., listings of upcoming events, blog posts and news releases
from individual senators, etc.) Drupal also has a large community of
users who are generally very helpful at answering questions if you run
into difficulty implementing something. The fact that it is open
source means that whenever this is some piece of functionality
missing, we can write it ourselves. It also means that the data is in
a format (MySQL) which is easily exported in the event that we should
want to do so.

On the "weaknesses" side, there is something of a learning curve
involved in become a skilled Drupal developer. Drupal is based on PHP,
which is a very flexible programming language for developing web-based
content. However, it is not always ideal for handling certain types of
structured data. For example, parsing XML is possible but less elegant
in PHP than in some other programming languages such as Java. Although
we have no regrets about choosing Drupal for the NY Senate's public-
facing website, we chose to use Java to develop OpenLegislation, our
legislative search engine, which needed to do a fairly robust job of
generating and parsing XML.

> 7.       Have you ever used other Web Content Management Systems (WCMS)? If so, why did you change to Drupal?

The Senate has used and still uses Lotus Notes for some internal
purposes. I don't know if you would consider that a web CMS. I have
personally worked in the past with MediaWiki, the open source software
package which powers Wikipedia. MediaWiki works well for certain
purposes -- wikis in particular, but Drupal makes more sense to me as
a general-purpose CMS with lots of extensibility and a strong base of
support from its developer community.

For simpler websites, many people prefer Wordpress, but if you expect
some complexity and need to be able to add functinoality and
customization, I think Drupal offers more options than Wordpress. I
know that Joomla also has a fairly large following, but I haven't
actually worked with it myself.

> 8.       What is the level of acceptance from your content contributors regarding Drupal's ease of use?

We had to do some trainings with Senate staff to get them familiar
with the process for adding content, but they've pretty much accepted
it now. The fact that they can add content and that we enable WYSIWYG
editing is a significant improvement over the past when they had to
submit their content to HTML specialists and wait for them to add it
rather than edit content on the site directly. We are currently
preparing to upgrade the site to Drupal 7, which will hopefully enable
us to improve the experience further for content contributors.

[Sam Richard]

I'd like to start this response by saying that as of late September, I no longer work for the New York State Senate, but I am still glad to answer questions based on my experience at the Senate.

1) The Senate, to the best of my knowledge, is still using Drupal 6 of the main website and used Drupal 7 for a microsite this summer, although at the time of my leaving they were looking to upgrade to Drupal 7. All projects I have worked on since leaving the Senate have been Drupal 7 projects.

2) I personally have been using Drupal for almost two years.

3) As with Sheldon, I was not part of the team that chose to go with Drupal initially.

4) To the best of my knowledge, the Senate uses Drupal to run their main web property and some micro sites. Personally, all web properties I own or work on are run off of Drupal.

5) As was previously mentioned, I was not part of the initial team, but if we had to choose a new platform going forward, I would.

6) To me, Drupal's great strengths are its community, breadth and quality of free contributed modules, and ease of extensibility. Weaknesses include a medium to high learning curve for developers and content editors, at least out of the box. The learning curve for content editors can be partially alleviated thanks to contributed modules, themes, and development work. 

7) I personally have used Wordpress and, while the administrative interface is very nice, it is very hard to build advanced functionality for and most of the community seemed to revolve around paid extensions or themes instead of the open source mindset that Drupal revolves around.

8) I never had any direct interaction with content contributors at the Senate, but the microsite that was created using Drupal 7 allowed people with no training to add content to the site and that project through a, for lack of a better term, sculpted content editing interface. That was fairly successful. The key for ease of acceptance is a good content creation UI and powerful tools. With work, both are achievable within Drupal, but do not come as out-of-the-box functionality.

~ Sam Richard

http://snug.ug

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