[support] Is Drupal Appropriate for Our Site?

[Miles Fidelman]

Victor Kane wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Miles Fidelman 
> <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net <mailto:mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>> wrote:
>
>     Jeez man - the guy wants to market his environmental compliance
>     services, not  build wizzy interactive web sites.  It's about getting
>     the right message across, in the most cost-effective way; not about
>     bells and whistles.
>
>
> It's not about bells and whistles, it's about educating ourselves to 
> base the functionality we create and propose to create for our clients 
> upon best practices.
>
> " I'll add new newsletters or
> white papers to the documents.shtml page, but that's about it. I would 
> like
> to add polls, a form-based e-mail capability for those who prefer to 
> ask for
> information that way rather than via regular e-mail, and -- perhaps -- the
> ability to comment on issues raised in newsletters and white papers"
>
> This justifies Drupal perfectly, but more important than which CMS 
> framework you use, or even if you hand-craft it, is respect for the 
> 40% changes in these requirements that will occur before the site is 
> finished, and respect for best practices to be observed in all that we 
> do, and the belief that in order to do this, we need to be involved in 
> the community around the tools we use.
The guy didn't ask if his job justifies Drupal, he asked if its the 
right tool for his job.  Anybody who says that their preferred tool is 
the solution for any and all problems is a fanboy, not a professional.

I gave an informed opinion that it's not.  I base that opinion on 
spending a lot of my career selling technical and advisory services into 
markets similar to the one he's in.  It happens that I've ALSO spent a 
lot of time building web sites for both my own businesses and for 
clients, and along the way built a hosting company - and understand all 
too well what's involved in operating and maintaining content management 
infrastructure.

I'll stick with my opinion that Drupal is overkill for a consulting 
business that's using their web site as essentially an electronic 
brochure.  Drupal is great for supporting interactive communities of 
interest (though it's suffered a bit what with some of the organic 
groups list modules lagging way behind the mainline code).  Plone is 
better if you're doing serious applications behind a web front-end (say 
an interactive compliance checklist), and some applications call for 
J2EE (though Java folks have a habit of thinking that Tomcat and 
Servlets are the answer to even the simplest problem - talk about 
over-complicating things).

The more fundamental questions are:

- who's going to develop and maintain the content - in this case, it 
sounds like Rich is managing his own content, so the question is: what's 
the easiest tool?

- who's going to maintain the underlying platform - in a simple case, 
better to rely on a commercial hosting provider who supports the 
platform you chose, which leads to the question of...

- Where to host: a lot of people would argue that Google Sites is the 
easiest way to go these days, and an awful lot of people seem to be 
going that way.  Personally, I'd never open my business to vendor 
lock-in - big vendors tend to change their policies arbitrarily, small 
vendors tend to go out of business.  For a simple situation, I'd go with 
a plain-vanilla Wordpress (or Drupal, or whatever) installation on 
someone like GoDaddy, using my own domain, with backup somewhere else - 
making it trivial to migrate.  For more complicated situations, I'd rent 
a virtual host.  For really complicated applications, I'd rent a managed 
machine.  (In my case, I run everything on a couple of machines that 
live in a local datacenter - legacies of my previous hosting business, 
that I keep around to support some funded R&D work).

Miles Fidelman


-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In<fnord>  practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra