Drupal development

CiviCRM can run alongside both WordPress and Drupal.

In either case, CiviCRM remains the CRM. It stores contacts, memberships, events, contributions, activities, relationships and other constituent data.

Where the two platforms differ is in how that data becomes part of the wider website.

For a relatively simple site, the difference may not matter very much. If you mainly need CiviCRM for event registration, donations or membership administration, both platforms can provide the website around it.

Most organisations do not need Drupal.

If your website mainly explains what you do, publishes news and provides a contact form, platforms such as Squarespace, Wix or WordPress may be simpler and cheaper.

That isn't a criticism of Drupal. It is about choosing technology appropriate to the job.

Drupal starts to make sense when your website stops being simply a place to publish information and becomes part of how your organisation actually works.

When a simple website is enough

A typical brochure website might contain:

A large Drupal cache database does not necessarily mean Drupal is failing to clear its cache.

We recently investigated a site where the cache tables appeared to be behaving normally: cron was running and the number of records in cache_page was being kept at around 5,000.

But the table itself had grown to hundreds of megabytes.

At one point, roughly 5,000 cached pages were consuming more than 800 MB.

The culprit was not broken cache clearing.

It was faceted search.