Assemble list of Pros & Cons of Drupal

[kylejbertelsen]

Pros:

• Very adaptable and powerful
• Large community with support
• Regularly-released security updates
• Relatively easy to find workers
• Third-party add-ons are available for most services and features not natively supplied in core, and these are usually well-tested and well-supported
• Drupal development brings a series of coding standards that would make our internal collaboration considerably easier, as we'd adhere to those standards
• Modules are available which can be used by developers to instill a more disciplined development process: there are essentially plug-and-play modules for PHPUnit, Behat, and Code-Coverage tests, among others. We could take this opportunity to have a VERY disciplined development process.

[kylejbertelsen]

Cons:

• Getting Drupal coded to the point where we already are with EE would be a significant lift
• Large installed base means that security holes are regularly found and exploited (but are fixed relatively quickly)
• Community is made-up of a very inconsistent userbase with wildly-inconsistent skill levels. Using third-party add-ons needs to be done carefully, to avoid implementing the code of maniacs
• There is a learning-curve. For most of what we'd need to do, it's not terribly steep, however.

[kylejbertelsen]

Pros of running our own instance of Drupal, versus a hosted solution:

• Unfettered level of control. We could do just about anything that is possible with Drupal, which is just about anything web-based. We wouldn't ever have to tell Marketing (or others) that we "can't" do something -- we could partner with them to determine when and how we could do it, with a clear idea of how heavy the lift is, how long it would take, and ultimately what it would cost.
• Responsiveness of the system and development processes is totally under our control
• We have people who can run, code and tune it already on-staff
• Enhancements requested by business units can be prioritized by us, rather than negotiating with the host for them.
• I have a pretty nice starter-build of Drupal that could give us a boost in bootstrapping an AKC Drupal.
• Customizations made for one AKC Drupal instance could be ramped-up for any additional AKC Drupal instances at our discretion without additional contracts and restrictions (example: we could share akc.org improvements with akcwinners.com, etc, at no extra cost).
• Potential to serve the dog community: it would be very possible to release Drupal installation profiles keyed for the needs of various segments of our enduser base -- for instance, vets, breeders, trainers, etc. Once started, it would be pretty easy to share content with and from those endusers.
• I'm reasonably sure that any hosted, proprietary solution would charge us for each ancillary site, whereas with our own custom multi-site Drupal build, we could (for the cost of labor, and possibly server resources):
  • Have a basic AKC theme with potentially all the features of base AKC.com, which could be altered and used on sites added via procedures we'd control (for a very basic site, it could happen in a single workday for a single developer)
  • Share a set of credentials across all AKC sites, giving our workers a single-sign-on to every one of these sites, with appropriate and configurable permissions.
  • When there are security holes discovered, we could plug those on every one of these sites at once, minimizing the work required to respond to security alerts.
  • Use these additional sites as additional sources of content and traffic
  • For commonly-used integrations with external sites, they could be used in every site in an identical way -- example: social integrations with Twitter could run identically (or as differently as we wish) with only different Twitter credentials on a per-site basis.

Cons of running our own instance of Drupal, versus a hosted solution:

• More time required for setup
• Assuming that a hosted solution supplies support, we'd be passing on that benefit
• Presumably, a hosted solution would apply security updates and patches for us. A minor benefit, as they are almost never time-consuming.
• If we decided to release installation profiles, there would almost certainly be support-requests.

[skt2]

Pros:

• Rich in content types. Very easy to create new content type and layout
• Well organized Users, Permissions and User Roles management

Cons:

• Large learning curves
• Module dependencies