My story began with moving away from Drupal to Sitecore.

Last January, I began a “To Drupal or not to Drupal…” thread on my blog because the organization I’ve worked for over twenty years decided to build a Digital Experience Platform (DXP). One goal for the DXP was to move all the organization’s websites to a unified CMS. Sitecore was selected for the unified CMS. The decision to move to Sitecore was not in my control. At the same time, I have to respect the leadership of my organization’s decisions and appreciate their willingness to invest and train their technologists on Sitecore. I chose to keep an open mind about Sitecore and gradually form an educated opinion about the product.

Having an educated opinion about Sitecore

After spending a half year working with Sitecore, my opinion is that Sitecore is a proprietary product with some clear vendor lock-in and expenses. At the same time, every Sitecore expert, also known as an MVP, was a top-notch developer that values and contributes back to Sitecore’s community. From a technology perspective, Sitecore is “flexible” where you could, in theory, change anything with a high level of the application’s knowledge. Still, compared to Drupal, there are not a lot of supported extensions to Sitecore.

Sitecore’s out-of-the-box experience, especially around installing it, was a struggle for everyone at my organization. Sitecore’s example website only demonstrated some fundamental functionality. I can’t give enough praise about Drupal’s Umami demo profile, which shows all the latest and greatest Drupal features. Using a proprietary closed source system did feel like I was using a “black box,” where debugging unexplainable errors felt almost impossible to resolve.

Another challenge my organization struggled with is finding Sitecore expertise. Sitecore has a steep learning curve that feels…Read More