CMS Vendors
Drupal Foundation
Drupal
Drupal is a long-standing, open-source content management system (CMS) player whose growing complexity over the years has come to preclude it from all but the higher echelons of news publishing.
- The platform excels at publishing high volumes of metadata-enriched, structured content; think of it as a vast database of intelligent content
- Drupal can famously be extended by a plethora of third-party modules but this adds substantial complexity (with attendant frustrations, delays and costs) for news organisations, and therefore Drupal today is most apt for large news organisations with ample tech resources
- As with WordPress, you'll want to work with a commercial managed service provider that can host, update and secure your Drupal environment
- Some named customers on the platform include The Economist, Crains, Patch and The Cook Political Report
Likely fit
Today, Drupal best fits a mid-sized (or ideally larger) news organisation, especially one with a high-volume of editorial throughput where content gets published to specific sections of a site via metadata in a less curated model. It also suits a news organisation that wants to create highly customised experiences, both for readers and journalists. Of course in either case, this means managing a team of Drupal-proficient developers. Conversely, smaller news organisations should avoid this platform and seek more news-specific solutions.
At a glance
Primary customer fit
Large news organisation
Secondary fit
Mid-sized independent news organisation
Most active geographies
Global
Official support hours
Depends on managed service provider
Officially supported languages for user interface
EN
Third-party language support available?
Yes
Licence model
Core licence is open source. Managed hosting and commercial add-on modules (e.g. from Acquia) cost extra
Scope summary
Drupal is primarily a content production and site management platform that heavily relies on third-party modules for news-specific capabilities and revenue-related features
Tech base
PHP
Cloud model
Managed service (PaaS)
Headquarters
N/A
Head count
N/A
What customers report
- Designed explicitly for community-generated content, Drupal combines social interaction and web publishing into one platform
- The platform is feature-rich, with thousands of add-on modules, some of which provide connector frameworks to integrate with other news systems like wire feeds
- Drupal natively provides good support for 'placeless' (as opposed to page-based) delivery and reuse of richly tagged content, as well as metadata-driven navigation and section-head pages
- Drupal offers better multilingual support than most CMS platforms
- You can find a diverse ecosystem of hosting and support offerings available in global marketplace
- Large global developer community can help interpret the platform's complexity, especially for mid-market customers
- News-oriented Drupal sites must rely on third-party modules for a complete solution, which creates complexity and can delay upgrades when module developers lag Drupal's core release cycle
- Consequently, Drupal is comparatively developer-heavy, while poor documentation aggravates this challenge
- Drupal's WYSIWYG editor provides a weak in-context experience, thus reducing its usefulness for page-level curation
- More generally, journalists tend to criticise the usability of Drupal more than other platforms
- Drupal's total cost of ownership (TCO) can escalate rapidly depending on the degree of customisation and breadth of modules required
Background
- One of the older platforms in this report, open-source Drupal has been around since 2001. Its origins as a combination CMS + community platform made it immediately popular with some media firms trying to foster user-generated content and community services in the pre-social network era. Over time — particularly in the past decade — Drupal became much more complex as it modernised, and today its media footprint tends to fall mostly among larger news organisations that can afford to retain multiple Drupal-specific developers.
- Much of Drupal's move upmarket comes from Acquia, the major commercial firm in the ecosystem that drives the roadmap and sells higher-end modules not available elsewhere.
- Unlike WordPress, Drupal excels at structured content and managing content components that 'know where they are supposed to go', based on metadata. This makes it suitable for larger, information-rich sites, where, for example, managing topic and section-head pages becomes too manually intensive. It's like a smart database for content. For editors familiar with working in another CMS platform, however, changing to Drupal will become a considerable shift. Content and modules are not managed in pages, folders and tree structures; instead, the structure gets built 'from the bottom up' based on metadata. This can prove challenging and indeed potentially unnecessary for news organisations that flow content in a more top-down way. Fortunately, Drupal's taxonomy management subsystem (which drives where content appears) is quite sophisticated.
- Like WordPress, Drupal licensees benefit from an exceptionally wide ecosystem of consultancies, gurus and module developers. Indeed Drupal's module ecosystem is broader than that of WordPress and Drupal itself is explicitly designed to be heavily customised and extended. However, there seems to be a 'Drupal way' of doing everything and that makes it a kind of an opaque art, such that the platform consistently lies among the most dreaded in annual web developer surveys. Nevertheless, this flexibility has enabled some Drupal-powered news sites to create advanced applications like reader-generated recipes (with approval workflows) and exceptionally complicated video carousels.
- In terms of what 'comes out of the box', sometimes publishers express surprise about the lack of native Drupal features specifically targeting news organisations. For example, there's no formal digital asset management (DAM) system and no native subscription or paywall services. Drupal gurus typically reply, 'there's a module for that' — and that's almost always true. The trick is to find the right module and then often have a Drupal expert customise it to your needs. Many advanced features (DAM, multi-title management, personalisation, packaged headless edition) must be licensed and hosted commercially from Acquia.
- Various firms over the years have tried to package specific Drupal 'distributions' targeted at news organisations, akin to Newspack for WordPress. None seem to have survived recent major Drupal platform upgrades.
- On the plus side, in choosing Drupal you enter a vast ecosystem of independent developers and consultancies, whom you may meet at the almost unparalleled breadth of Drupal user groups (online and in person) around the world.
- Also, you can find a wide range of commercial Drupal hosting and support packages, ranging from exceptionally cheap for the basics, to exceptionally expensive for things like high availability and advanced security controls. As with WordPress, someone will need to keep the system consistently patched against the torrent of attacks this widely deployed platform invites.
Package scope (as reported by vendor)
| Core platform - i.e., bundled in product (yes/no/beta) | Add-On (yes/custom/3rd party) | |
|---|---|---|
|
Content lifecycle: author / classify / edit / approve / publish / re-purpose / archive / dispose
|
Yes
|
|
|
Basic digital / voice / media asset management
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Support print publishing
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Simple social media re-publishing
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Optional modules: forms / polls / social widgets / etc
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Connector library (OOTB connectors, APIs, etc.)
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Bundled CDN (with DDOS protection)
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
User registration
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Subscription management and fulfillment - digital
|
No
|
|
|
Subscription or membership
|
No
|
|
|
Personalisation
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Ad management - digital
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Ad management - print
|
No
|
|
|
Content management
|
No
|
|
|
Research
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Content management
|
No
|
|
|
Video management / OVP
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Audio management / podcasting
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Data journalism and visualisation
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Classifieds
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Commenting / community features/
|
Yes
|
|
|
Newsletter production and management
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Notifications and alerts
|
Yes
|
|
|
A/B testing
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
SEO
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Multi-title management with variable inheritance
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Complex layout and subsite / subsection cloning
|
Yes
|
|
|
AR- / VR- enhanced services
|
No
|
|
|
Audience segmentation
|
Yes
|
|
|
Online user / partner forums
|
Yes
|
|
|
Regular user group meetings
|
Yes
|
|
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