Question

We want to build a web application, that is specific to our domain, but also includes forums, blogs, etc in this application. Some integration points to Twitter and Facebook are also required.
There will also be a desktop application that connects to our web application for uploading data and downloading configuration and reports.

The question is, can we extend Drupal to host both the regular modules and our web application? (There will be business entities and their properties and daily data uploaded from the desktop application)
Or can Drupal be integrated with external applications? As an example, users and roles need to be the same and consistent across both. We may also want data from the web application searchable in Drupal.

I know this is a bit vague, but I cannot reveal more. I am very new to content management and I just wanted to know if someone has built this kind of application.

Answer 1

I try to rephrase what you wrote, just for you to check that I got your question right. You basically need to create a web application that:

1. Implements some of the standard functionality of Drupal
2. Have some custom functionality that should “blend into” the Drupal one (same users, same permissions, etc…)
3. Be able to upload/download content (or data) from desktop applications.

If I got you right, the short answer is: yes, you can do that with Drupal.

Now for the extensive one:
– Drupal has literally thousands of modules, so I expect you to get most of the things you want by simply installing the right combination of readily available modules.
– Of course, any custom functionality can easily be implemented in form of a module too (quite standard thing these days).
– The interaction with a desktop application is normally implemented via webservices rather than querying the DB directly. Drupal comes natively with a xmlrpc server and client, but you can scale up to SOAP – if you wish – via a couple of contrib modules.

Some additional thoughts:

• If you choose to use Drupal, and you start from scratch, then you have to be aware you and your team will need to dedicate some time and effort to understand how Drupal works. Although – differently than Palantir – I stuck with Drupal, I agree with her/him on the fact that Drupal gets complicated complex right off the bat. This is the trade-off you have to pay in order to have a platform that – rest assured – is very flexible, extremely pluggable and rock-solid (otherwise it wouldn’t have been used to redesign the whitehouse, nor Drupal would have got for the second year in a row the “best PHP CMS” award, I suppose).
• The good news is: there are some excellent books out there, and I would certainly recommend “Pro Drupal Development” for an in-depth and all-around explanation of the system. Just be sure to get the 2nd edition, as the first deals with the now obsolete 5 seres. That said…
• A very good thing about Drupal, at least in my opinion, is that most of the tweaks you might need to do to an existing functionality can be implemented by hooking into the original code from a custom module too. This IMO is the biggest advantage of Drupal: you never have to touch other developers’ code to achieve your goals, and this means – for example – that you will be able to keep your core and contrib modules up-to-date without breaking any customisation you might have done.
• Drupal is heavy. Compared to other CMS it sucks plenty of processing power and RAM from your server, and – unless you are going to have a very small site – I recommend to deploy it in conjunction with nginx, rather than Apache.
• Drupal scales well, thanks to a good mechanism of caching and “throttling up” mechanisms. Strange as it might sound, Drupal scales very well on large traffic websites, so that big increases in traffic do not necessarily imply big increases in resource usage.
• The user experience out-of-the-box on a Drupal site is quite poor. There is a massive work being done on this at the moment (here and here (video)), but improvements won’t be available until D7 is released [soon, but then you will have to wait for the modules to be ported], so it is advisable to allocate some time to create an administrative theme, if the admins of your website won’t be of the technical type.

At the end of the day, my advice is: if your site is going to go big / complex / with complicated business logic and lots of functionality, then Drupal is probably a good candidate. If your site is contrarily a small-scale one with standard functionality plus a few custom bits, maybe WordPress / Joomla could fit your needs better [not because they are ‘less powerful’ but because Drupal strengths would be unused in this case, while WordPress/Joomla simpler architecture would probably represent an advantage in this scenario]

Other options would certainly be frameworks like CakePHP or Django, for example, but that – IMO – is a totally different approach to the matter, I would say.