Is Drupal ready for the enterprise? [closed]

Question

Is anyone out there using Drupal for large scale, business critical enterprise applications?

Does Drupal's lack of database transaction support dissuade potential users?

Are there any other lightweight web-frameworks based on dynamic languages that people are using for these types of apps? What about Java portals such as JBossPortal or Jetspeed as an alternative or a Drupal + J2EE hybrid architecture?

Answer 1

I recommend against Drupal due to its inefficiency. Yes, it can do almost anything, but it does it slowly. For any but the simplest of sites, drupal will not build nearly as efficient a chain of queries and pages as a custom built site will. Something that can be done by hand with two SQL joins and a single PHP loop is likely to be handled by Drupal with five joins and a nested loop.

That said, I love Drupal and will continue using it in non-enterprise environments, and I cannot recommend any other CMS that does not have similar problems when presented with complex tasks.

Answer 2

Drupal is great, but it is very inefficient. But, as I keep telling my frontend developers, this is the payoff for being flexible and highly modular.

We are currently creating a Druapl site, which I consider enterprise (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/161991/what-makes-an-application-an-enterprise-or-enterprise-level-application). It has about 40 content types, 15 user roles, integrated with Ubercart, interfacing with external APIs for membership verification etc. etc. Our development servers struggle some times, but on our staging hosting, it is lightening - fast as any similar sized site.

Make sure any bespoke code is well developed, use Drupal's performance features before release and ensure quality hosting is used.

Answer 3

Drupal is used all over the place and has a very large community supporting its development. There is also a large for hire community if you want a custom drupal component.

Answer 4

I was the lead developer behind the recently relaunched American Diabetes Association - http://forecast.diabetes.org/ - rebuild in Drupal. At launch, we were getting about 250k uniques/month and it's been growing significantly. While the criticism for "inefficient query chains" is mostly accurate, there is a reason for that. The Lazy Loading pattern is used as frequently and often as possible. To streamline the process a bit, you can always configure Drupal's caching, there are some addon modules, and then you could go with something like APC or memcached.

Regardless, the trade off of being easily extended, customized, and - in normally less than an hour - having something to show the customer and allow them to load content, is pretty significant.