Sep 08 2009 at 8:04pm

Why we didn’t choose Drupal

Well, actually, we didn’t really “choose” anything. Something was chosen for us in the form of a “donation” from  OpenText of their web content management products to the university. I co-chaired the committee that was charged with investigating content management systems in the fall and winter 2008/2009. This “donation” was arranged completely outside of our committee. In fact, we didn’t even know it was happening until the deal was essentially done.

I did do my best to sell the benefits of Drupal to the committee, and to explain why the OpenText product (formerly called RedDot) was not a good solution (phrasing it politely). However, I’m not sure that, given the chance, “we” would have chosen Drupal anyway. Why? Here’s a few of the biggest objections given by others in the group:

  1. Sever models – the other two systems under consideration used a “push” model where static pages would be published to outlying web servers. This was considered to be preferable to a centralized model where pages are served by a database. Why? Mainly because many units within the university really want to run their own web servers. They also liked that the main system was “behind the firewall” and therefore more secure. This issue was focused on by some people to the exclusion of any other factors (usability? functionality? extensibility? who cares?). A few people actually said that since these two systems used the same publishing model then they were “really the same”.
  2. “It’s not enterprise” - I’m not sure what this is actually supposed to mean but it was a big problem for some people (and I’ve heard this in other higher ed circles as well). Maybe if it had a sticker price of half a million dollars and  obscenely complicated server requirements, then it would be “enterprise”??
  3. Security – there are still many people out there who believe that open source must be insecure because it’s developed by “some guy in his basement.”

There might have been other issues, had we ever gotten around to actually testing Drupal against the other two systems. Drupal isn’t exactly known for its usability, but from what I saw from the others Drupal isn’t any worse and might actually be better. To be honest, our presentation from Acquia didn’t do a lot to make the benefits of Drupal more clear.

Update 04/02/2011: As is turns out we did choose drupal.

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5 Responses to “Why we didn’t choose Drupal”

  1. random person September 16th, 2009 at 3:02 pm

    It’s very hard to win an intelligent debate once ignorance has ‘dug in it’s heals’.

  2. Lea November 27th, 2009 at 8:58 pm

    I am not also using drupal because of the reasons you mentioned above. For security purposes I am using wordpress.

  3. Megan November 30th, 2009 at 4:49 pm

    Seriously?

  4. Craig December 21st, 2009 at 10:34 am

    “To be honest, our presentation from Acquia didn’t do a lot to make the benefits of Drupal more clear.”

    I’m interested in hearing how the Acquia presentation failed to show the benefits of Drupal. I’m always looking for “what works” and “what didn’t work” when trying to sell the Drupal as a system.

  5. Megan December 30th, 2009 at 8:09 pm

    Hi Craig,

    To be honest, that presentation was almost a year ago and I don’t remember too many specifics. I know that it seemed confusing to a lot of people. They expected something more basic. You have to be able to sell the benefits of a modular system without making it seem confusing.

    I was also hoping they’d address the benefits of a centralized server model as opposed to the “push” model which a lot of people were really sold on.

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