Drupal

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post on why customers complain about Drupal -- the short version is that they either had incorrect expectations, or "developers" who were in over their heads.

Mavis asks,

I have already spent thousands of dollars on my [Zen Cart] website. What would be your advice for [a company] who wants to transfer their site to a new host but not redesign it?

At Freelock, we're huge fans of Drupal. But we keep running into customers (or potential customers) who are terrified of it. So here's our take on why.

A question came across the Drupal Developer's list today asking whether Drupal could auto-update itself, like WordPress. As someone who thinks about security a lot, the very thought of this horrifies me.

It's a bad idea for several reasons, but the biggest reason:

Short answer: it depends.
We still do most of our projects in Drupal 6, mainly because it's been around a few years, and modules we use on many sites are not yet stable for Drupal 7 (and some are still a ways off).

Mike asks,

I came across your site as i'm a member of NWEN.  My current site is built on a wordpress template and I want to change it as it's pretty rough.  What are the pros/cons of having a site built with Drupal vs. word press?

Wesley at The Nubby Admin asks,

Drupal provides powerful tools that makes it easy to do all sorts of changes to your web site, but one change is difficult: changing the content type of a node after you've created it.

Just the other day I got a request for proposal for hosting, complete with a statement that they knew of some hosting that would cost $15/month. The implication being that they were looking for a hosting proposal that would not exceed that amount.

Mel asks:

Why would I use Drupal instead of Microsoft Expression Web to create a website?

We regularly import content from old web sites and systems.

URLs are a critical part of all web sites, not just Drupal. However, in Drupal, the URL of a page determines a lot about how the page is built.