Drupal vs Custom PHP for Social Network
We keep discussing technology choices for large-scale fundraising platform. Last time we compared Drupal with Joomla, here we would like to share our thoughts regarding Pros and Contras of Drupal and custom PHP solutions.
Drupal Pros:
1. Pretty quick development (it’s near 30% faster due to the set of features implemented from abox)
2. The most cost-effective solution.
3. A lot of free modules, templates available on Drupal.org market. In particular for user management it has a wide range of modules that help to manage user profiles, set up different user permissions, and arrange user authentication and registration easily.
4. There are a lot of modules for quick 3rd party integrations, for example, it’s easy to find ready modules for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, as well as for a wide range of payment options, like Paypal, Authorize.net and credit card payment system integrations.
5. Easier maintenance and support due to module-based system (if you need update, replace, extend functionality, you can find an appropriate solution for 80% of cases and you will not need to spend a lot of time for the process).
6. Stability of solution.
Drupal Contras:
1. For Drupal solution you should follow best practices from the very beginning and do not change anything under Drupal core.
2. Redundant functionality: any CMS contains more features than you may need, so there is always a space for extra code that is not eventually needed.
3. Drupal admin part is pretty complex for those who is not tech-savvy.
Custom Pros:
1. The most flexible, custom-tailored solution, you can implement any kind of logics for your site.
2. If developers are good, you can reach pretty clean code quality.
3. Opportunity to deliver highly optimized custom solution (in terms of resources, page load speed, absence of redundant functionality, etc).
4. Higher productivity.
5. Higher scalability under great architecture implemented.
Custom Contras:
1. Less dynamic development, especially at early stages of development
2. Price will be higher, not only because of development will be longer, but because usual rate for custom and CMS development are slightly different (10-15% higher).
3. System maintenance and options to extend will be more complex (due to the fact that tailored development requires any extension to be custom), also it’s hard to understand someone’s custom code problems comparing to finding issues under CMS solution (because Drupal system is just set of modules).
4. Dev team should be chosen very attentively, architecture team undertaking the development should be strong enough to create good system architecture at the beginning, otherwise the lack of competence during this stage may cause a lot of problems in future.
Read also: Drupal vs. Joomla for Fund-Raising Platform (Social Network)
We would highly recommend Drupal for quick Project run time.
If you have questions please contact us.
