How stable & professional is Drupal? Drupal in Banks? Drupal for Insurance Company websites?

Drupal is a PHP/MySQL app also known as "community plumbing" (though that always makes me think of toilets)

Drupal is formally classified as a Content Management System (CMS) Portal. That means it "manages" content and provides a portal for access to a wide variety of functions, which vary from site to site depending on the developer's choices and configuration settings.

Drupal has been around since 2001 and is preparing to release v 7

It is not an authoring tool like Dreamweaver or Frontpage - content in Drupal is stored in the database, you could import code from Dreamweaver, or use a Rich Text editor in Drupal such as FCKeditor for kinda-sorta WYSIWYG authoring.

Drupal is more like vBulletin on steroids... This forum uses Drupal

I build about 80% of my projects with Drupal, and a proper selection of free plug-in modules permits the sites to provide functions for:

ecommerce (a few options including the excellent Ubercart)

video uploads, rating, etc

image galleries

advertising lead tracking

member buddylists and messaging

nonprofit orgs - schedule events, manage members, forums, fundraising and more (using CiviCRM)

and much much more -

In response to your questions about security, robustness etc, here are some case studies

There are excellent handbooks on drupal.org to get started

There are excellent videos on lynda.com

I also recommend the free videos at Mastering Drupal

And excellent recommended books

It takes some time to really understand how to build effectively with Drupal and leverage its strengths.

I have recently been developing a site in Joomla! - probably Drupal's main "competition" - and every step of the way I am reminded why I like Drupal

If you prefer a commercially-supported solution (still using the open-source core), Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, has launched the Acquia Drupal project (ie, Drupal with hand-holding - for a price)

It depends what you mean by 'stable'. If you're asking whether installations of Drupal don't break often, then yes, Drupal is very stable. If you're asking whether Drupal has a stable API, then no, Drupal's API changes with every major release. There is always some upgrade work to do when a major release comes out, however the code base is maturing and the time between releases is increasing (Drupal 7 is due at the end of 2009 -- roughly).

If you're worried about security I can attest that the Drupal security team is on-the-ball. Just sign-up to the security mailing list, and you'll get an alert when a security bug is discovered in Drupal. Any security bugs found in contributed (third-party) modules are also covered in those alerts.

As for professional: Warner Bros. use Drupal, there are lots of other examples under that link in Decibel.Places post.

I'm not sure that we can convince you to use Drupal though, it's really up to you. It's not like we're salesmen and it's our job (or that we'll see any profit) to convince you. I say this as I could spend hours expounding the virtues of Drupal, but lack the time or experience of a professional salesman.

and it's being built with Drupal by someone else, and after 1 month, not much is there to impress me yet.

Bad analogy alert: if a contractor builds you a crappy house extension, is it the fault of his hammer? Drupal is just a tool, it can be used for good or bad.

One feature I should point you to is multi-site: you'll be able to handle all those banks under the same Drupal installation (but not necessarily using the same database).

For a bank's site, as in a public information and promotional tool for their customers, then yes, definitely. Drupal runs many many high end sites for major companies and organizations such as WB, Sony, MTV, FastCompany, major newspapers, Amnesty International, and more. It's also been trusted to run at least several Presidential candidate websites. However, if it were for the purpose of running actual "online banking" then that I can't vouch for myself. I'm sure that major banks must employ entire IT and web development teams to build and maintain the security of their online banking systems. They probably also have very custom/proprietary code for interfacing with that data. Drupal "could" be used if they wanted to (with a variety of custom modules), but they would still have to employ security experts. In any case Drupal could always be used as the front end of the site without question (e.g. company info, FAQ, support, services, etc).

So anyhow, I'm guessing these sites you mentioned are not for "online banking", and if that's the case, yes, Drupal is an excellent option. If you will be hosting all of the sites yourself, then definitely consider using Drupal multi-sites, which keeps the databases completely separate, but allows you to use a single copy of Drupal and modules (vastly easier to take care of once you have a few sites to deal with).

Good luck!

There is no comparison... Drupal is superior. The question would not even come up once some one knows what Drupal can do. The only other CMS I could possible compare Drupal to us Joomla. Comparing Drupal and designing pages in Dreamweaver is a joke.

I use Drupal for all of my websites and all of my websites are Finance and insurance related. Managing large website with Drupal is AWESOME! Hope it helps