Drupal

In the world of software and web development simplicity is a funny thing. We are always striving to make our work and our product simple: simple to understand, simple to use, and simple to maintain. This is one of the many reasons we use Drupal as our development framework here at Freelock.

Customer Relationship Management. After the term being around for the past 15 years or so, it seems CRM is becoming a really hot thing right now.

Over the past couple weeks, I've updated the Drupal Dojo Toolkit module to support the new AMD module layout and asynchronous loading.

The rest of my team may not agree with me, but I greatly prefer the Dojo Toolkit to jQuery, when it comes to Javascript libraries. Why? Perhaps it's because I want to justify the hundreds of hours I've spent learning and re-learning the API as it continues to evolve.

We have several customers interested in adding CRM to their Drupal sites, so today I hopped on a conference call with a working group developing CRM tools for Drupal 7.

Mobile is hot right now. Most of our current clients are actively thinking about, if not proceeding with, mobile access to their web sites or building a mobile application. Guess what -- it turns out Drupal is a good platform for that, too!

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?