I’m looking to use Drupal from an upcoming project as I’ve always been very interested in using it. However the more I get familiar the more I feel that Drupal isn’t a good solution for a website that is very dynamic in terms of page-to-page layout alterations and just generally dynamic elements in pages.
For example, the front page of the website is going to have a newsletter signup form with 2 steps, which should be done through Ajax. Just to achieve this I’ve already had to install like 5 modules to get the right behaviour. And at this point I don’t feel it’s very user-friendly for end-users who are going to be using the CMS once it’s delivered.
My question is simple, am I wrong in assuming that Drupal really isn’t the right solution for this type of website? And if I am, what is the conventional approach developers take to the implementation of solutions such as the one I mentioned?
Thanks
Drupal is highly customizable, but yes takes a lot of work to get set up to do what you’d like. Other CMS’ provide much simpler out of the box style ‘install this addon through an interface and fuhgeddaboudit’ type of solutions for the more layman user. WordPress and Joomla come to mind.
If you want to go a more developer oriented route I would suggest one of the many php frameworks out there. CodeIgniter and Symfony2 are a few popular ones, but there are tons of them out there. Play around with them and see which is better suited to your needs.