When And Why Should You Use Drupal or Rails For Projects

There are several reasons why we used Drupal. Even if I am a Rubyist, I also use Drupal (PHP5) for certain reasons.

When and Why Should You Use Drupal?

a) Both time and money is a major concern

You'll hardly find good Ruby/Python programmers with hourly rates below $15 on ODesk. You can hire newbie's at below $10/hr however. If you have some understanding of Drupal configuration, Unix and XHTML at the very least, you can get some things done with Drupal at little or no cost.

b) You are prototyping a platform

You're just not sure what you're doing. Everything is an "experiment." You have an idea, but don't believe you can make money out of it - YET. Use Drupal. The fact that Drupal has the essentials a "working" application, you'll learn that there are many things you don't need to bother about so you can focus on the design and elements of the site (blocks, nodes, content types, views).

c) You want at least 50% of the site features done within 2 days

I conceived an idea about a blog site where I can post my rants and people can contact me if they have any similar issues with a certain website like eBay. They can report issues, register (and spam protection is available) and provide feedback. After 2 days or about 16 hours of work, the site is fully launched with all the basic features. Deployment is done using Capistrano. I didn't bother remembering things because I use Git. Some things I've learned as a Ruby developer, I apply to PHP projects. Some of my sites are still using PHP5.

d) You believe you need a module, not a developer

I needed twitter integrated with that site too (new blog posts are announced via Twitter) and there’s a module for that. Few minutes and the feature is working (for all users).

e) The web server doesn’t support Ruby on Rails applications

Still not much of a reason but people say it's the number one issue. They don't know Unix, Git, Capistrano and all that. There's a free Heroku plan, you know that right?

When and Why Should You Use Rails?

a) High-traffic sites

See Scaling Rails screencasts.

b) You are an optimist, driven to learn quickly as changes for the Rails framework are done everyday

If it works, it's ok. If it doesn't work, it's still ok. Only an optimist can see the bright(er) side of things. But the skilled businessman/developer (who should be an optimist) will just make it work.

c) Usability is a major concern and you just care about every small detail of the project.

d) You think “starting from scratch” is better than scratching your head and worrying about overriding default templates.

e) You just can afford a good VPS host (and hire a Unix geek if you’re not one).