Is Drupal ready for the enterprise?

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.

Having helped to create drupal sites for Popular Science Magazine and soon another magazine (which I'm not sure if I can name yet?), I think it's quite suitable. We've also done an intranet site for BMW and Pregnancy.org.

It may not be perfect yet, but it's quite suitable.

I've worked on a Drupal project with about 1 million nodes. We added transactional support and it wasn't too hard. You'll need to patch the core of course but this shouldn't be a major concern for an enterprise application with good support and documentation. I was working as the observing pair programmer on the transactional support. I think it took us about a day.

Edit:

I've been working as a Drupal Developer for a few years now. And recently, I have revised my position on Drupal in relation to best practices and enterprise application.

I don't think Drupal is particularly suited to the Enterprise space because:

• Drupal's testing framework is too cumbersome (a domain specific language would be great)
• There are too many contributed modules of poor quality
• Drupal's content model resides partly in code and partly in the database schema
• Drupal's developer community have become focused on sexy software rather than quality software
• Drupal doesn't have mature developer tools (drush is changing that) or a development environment built in.
• Drupal Development is browser and UI centric.
• The centralized nature of Drupal.org/projects, CVS and Drupal's policy on Contrib Projects inhibits the evolution of individual software projects

Also: The enterprise Drupal Application I was once working on has now been ported into Rails.

I've used Drupal to build a combined public-facing site for an organization that also included internal features for employees such as meeting organization and internal document management. Mostly it worked out well and they are happy with it, and very happy not to have to manage two separate sites and / or something like sharepoint.

The one place I found Drupal to be a little lacking is in its LDAP support. You can use it just fine for authentication, but there are some bugs in the modules that try and bring LDAP groups down as roles, if this worked more seamlessly I would be completely on board with the "Drupal is enterprise-ready" sentiment, but it's not there yet.

That said, you can do a lot with content types and taxonomy-based access control to customize what content is available to what roles, something that is a requirement for most intranets.

I too have issues with Drupal's slowness, but it seems that with top notch developers you can get around it.

It's a moderately difficult tool to make a company website with, its a very difficult tool to make an enterprise-application with. But when it comes to open source LAMP CMS's, there is no real competitor.

Drupal is great. I've used it for several mid-scale community and personal websites, and so far is giving us very good results. I would support the comment pointing at the over-done or even low quality of the templates of many of the website's we've looked at out there, but then, just hire a good coder/designer that does this nicely for you.

As for the memory issues there's tons of articles out there that would help you in tweaking Drupal's database management. There's even a module called Drupal Tweaks that does this automatically for you. Here is an excerpt from its project page:

... provides following functionality:

• Enabling and disabling modules through autocomplete suggestions
• Quick search for the nodes, users, etc. to make some operations
• clear the cache and rebuild permissions from one place or do them both at once

Overall we are quite happy so far with Drupal for quick development of the most varied websites and corporate Intranets.