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Comment by thibaut_barrere | Hacker News Reader

To people using Drupal in production: can you share what you consider to be the sweet spot for using Drupal? Also, are you mostly using existing components, or leaning more toward custom development?

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I've worked on many Drupal sites, and I would say the sweet spot is a client who is going to budget $10k+. Basically, under $10k budget means you should be looking at simpler, pre-baked solutions, like Wordpress, Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, static HTML, etc.. I've worked on Drupal projects from $25-250k+, and it can handle pretty much everything (sometimes requiring a lot of TLC tho).

There are so many contributed modules that can help build things out, but I always need some type of customizations requiring (usually a few) custom modules per project. It all depends... I did one project that had dozens of crazy features that we broke out into 70+ custom modules...

But yea, I would say the sweet spot is a customer who needs a pretty large site with a lot of functionality. My 2 cents anyway.

This is some very useful insight, thanks! I've been asking this since at times, fully custom development (I ship Rails apps mostly, since 2005) is not the way to go, so I'm looking for other options where using modules (either custom or purchased) could help.

I would like to make a point that a very nice thing about the Drupal community is a lack of paid modules. There is a conscious effort to either open source or custom develop. There are not very many "paid extensions." The community seems a lot more focused on creating low level tools that you can use to build a finished product.

This is in part due to the relative complexity of setup. You do not get your grandma performing a one click install of Drupal and then spending $40 on a theme and buying an extension or two from a marketplace.

The focus on earning money with Drupal really seems to be in being a good developer and knowing how to use the thousands of opensource tools that are available to Drupal. You do not see people cranking out apps or modules for drupal and selling them in a marketplace. This really sets it apart from it's php cousins Magento and Wordpress.

I would recommend for larger-type websites, and not so much for performance-based applications. However, ignoring my own advice, we did build a todo list app powered by Drupal & React.js and it works pretty well: http://www.135list.com

You can literally build anything in Drupal, although I'm not sure you should...

I would suggest you consider drupal as a basis for your fully custom sites. You start out of the box with a well supported, standards based system for the basics: user management/authentication, data modeling/storage/query, routing, path handling, HTML templating etc etc. It has a huge ecosystem of modules, also effectively out of the box, for third party integrations and all sorts of esoteric requirements. So you start writing your custom code on an established base with a strong API for modification and integration, which means less custom code to support.

In a Drupal custom module you can do or change literally anything, and you can write whatever architecture you like for your individual component. You just have to integrate with the Symfony2 router and dependency injection container. Pretty cool stuff.

Great - thanks everyone for your replies!

This looks interesting indeed.

May I ask what is your preferred way to learn Drupal for a total newcomer, albeit a truly seasoned developer?

Unfortunately, the book I usually point people to [1] when they ask a question like that is not yet updated for Drupal 8. Frankly, we're probably going to be in that awkward state where supply for learning resources for D8 is greatly overwhelmed by demand for a little while at least. But it's OSS; if all else fails, you can trace the source code, assuming you've got the PHP chops.

1: http://www.drupalbook.com

Where to start? There's a complete Drupal 8 Beginner class available on YouTube now: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtaXuX0nEZk9MKY_ClWcP...

Check out Drupalize.me: https://drupalize.me/

It's a paid monthly service, but well worth the educational value you get out of it (for a few months at least).

Good luck!

I used Drupal (6 and 7) in a small bank (80/100 internal users, 500+ financial advisors), building the external public site and also a an internal site used mainly to share documents, modules, faq etc.. with the network of advisors.

It replaced a commercial solution bringing more clarity (but that was also thanks to stricter rules in place defining types of docs, fields etc..), better graphic appeal (but just because the previous one was really crap) and also great search experience thanks to Apache Solr.

As I am a sysadmin, not a developer, I used all built-in modules except one that I modified in order to integrate the authentication with another business system via webservices (only code I developed). As I am also not a graphic, I worked with an external one (that prepared design in PSP so it was a bit a pain to convert it to template)

At that time (2009 I think) I reviewed few other options (WP, ezPublish, plone) but I chose Drupal because the authorisation system with roles etc.. was much more powerful than WP one.

I mostly use existing components, because they're there and (usually) of high quality and integrate well together. But on a project of any size you'll need custom development. If your project is so small you don't need any custom development, you might have been happier with a simpler CMS in the first place. I've always liked the description of Drupal as a content management framework.

Thanks for your input, appreciated! A bit of custom isn't a problem (I'm used to do everything custom usually!), but it's good to know there are truly useful existing components which can play well together.

Yes indeed. There are so many existing useful components that there's a whole section of the Programmer's Guide to Drupal [0] called "Common Drupal Programming Mistakes: Programming Too Much." Almost all the Drupal code I write is either integration or patches to existing projects.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027799.do

I'm building with Angularjs and Express right now coming from a Drupal experience. At every turn I'm looking to Drupal and Drupal contributed modules to solve problems, for example, media asset management. If I had to to solve for internationalization, document versioning control, publishing workflow, publishing workflow with versioning control (lol), integration with a full-text search engine, micro data markup, and several other common problems, I would start with Drupal which also provides a fully functioning REST server that integrates with all these things seamlessly. That is the miraculous part, the seamless integration. It is plug and play, but sometimes I have to open up the insides and write 'glue code' to bridge the different components. Also, I have to export configuration from the database into code which is possible. I'm talking Drupal 7. Can't wait till I get a Drupal 8 project.

   Legos - Custom built web app
   Duplos - Drupal, fully customized with some coding
   Pre-Built Toy - SquareSpace, Wix, even Wordpress to a certain extent

It's a nice middle ground when you need something more custom than Wordpress and others can provide, but don't want to build everything from scratch.

Neat. Thanks for the metaphor, looks clear now :-)

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