Information About Drupal - Interview

Brigham Young University
Computer Science Department
Use of Drupal

Sharon Jones

Dave DeLong
Brigham Young University
Computer Science Department
Computer Science Department Webmaster
https://davedelongisland.byu.edu/users/ddelong


Dave DeLong likes Drupal because the user can set up sophisticated user access rules. He has created roles for each type of user and then assigned the appropriate permissions to these users. The Content Access module is very useful as well. Drupal is great for building very complicated sites. You can definitely do this in Drupal and with Drupal you don’t need to modify any core code. Drupal is a modular system, which means the user can build any sort of custom functionality on top of Drupal, without having to modifying core.


1. What were their motivations to adopt CMS for its current use?

BYU University Computer Science Department chose Drupal for a content management system, on its website, because it had a conglomeration of custom utilities, with no concept of content management. Many webmasters, over the years, had cobbled together a number of custom scripts into the department website. All of this legacy information had to survive the transition into a content management system.

2. What were their decision making criteria?

There were two reasons they chose Drupal: number one was that the module and theme system appeared to be easy to customize and number two was the documentation of Drupal as open source software.

3. What was the name of the CMS they were using?

There was no content management previous to this implementation.

4. What system did they choose?

Drupal was chosen.

5. What are the important benefits of advantages of CMS they are using now over the old system or another CMS system they’ve used in the past?

Drupal was easy to install, easy to use, had lots of features and modules, was flexible, free and has lots of users. Some of the most useful features include the error log, the views module, and the access control/roles.

6. How was the learning curve.

The learning curve was approximately six months from the very beginning to deployment.

7. Was there any resistance to implementing Drupal?

There were various committees who resisted Drupal, but they were convinced to adopt the new technology.

8. Did you look at any other systems?

Joomla was also evaluated.