A content management system or CMS is a software tool which lets users add, publish, edit or remove content from a website by just the use of a web browser on a desktop computer or even on a smartphone. The CMS software is written in a scripting language and its scripts run on a computer where a database and a web server is installed. The combination of the Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database and the PHP scripting language is known as the LAMP stack.
The official definition says that “Drupal is a flexible CMS based on a The LAMP stack, with a modular design and allows features to be added and removed by installing and uninstalling modules; and also allows changing the look and feel of the website by installing and uninstalling themes. Drupal Core contains the PHP scripts which are needed to run the basic CMS functionality, many optional modules and themes and many JavaScript and CSS files.” Many more modules and themes for Drupal can be downloaded from the Drupal.org website.
If you have been analyzing various blogs and trying to find out which content management system is the best then you might have seen the debates between WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. In this article also we are analyzing this and will tell you why most customers have chosen Drupal. Although every CMS has some advantages Drupal is most effective for a long-term perspective. This reason of this is that Drupal features an amazing collection of modules and allows the development of any kind of website whether you want to create a blog, an informational site, a brochure company site, a full social community or an e-commerce company. Drupal is the right tool for all of these jobs. Let’s go deeper to find out why Drupal is the best CMS for you.
1. Drupal is an Open Source CMS
As open source software are built for free hence they are available for free. The only costs required with Drupal are the costs of building a website and the costs of hosting the site on a server. There are no licensing fees for Drupal which greatly reduces the cost of running a world-class site. As Drupal code is open source hence so many developers around the world are associated with the development of Drupal. Even if you see that something is missing in it then you can also edit it or you can request changes from more experienced members of the community. Numerous small or large enterprises, governments and NGOs websites are powered by Drupal or have switched to Drupal. Drupal powers WhitHouse.gov, The Economist, The University of Arizona, YMCA, municipalities in Denmark and big companies like NBC and LUSH. Drupal is not the just open source and affordable but it is also scalable and easy to personalize for visitors.
2. Drupal offers High Level of Quality
Drupal consists of a robust, rapid and agile module for the purpose of web development. Since it is an open source CMS hence web developers from all over the world can work on it and fix all the issues and bugs that appear as per their requirements. It has more than 13,000 modules using which developers can quickly add specific features to their sites. You can easily add features like CRM, polls, login modules, security, backup, performance, Social Media and SEO to your website. Therefore you can achieve high quality on your website by using Drupal and also the development time is reduced considerably. Drupal comes with regular updates from a huge active Drupal community making it easier for the developers to get so many benefits.
3. Drupal is Cost Effective
The best CMS, Drupal is free and can get be installed without the need of purchasing any license or recurring fees. Drupal comes with many options by which you can choose the variety of modules and third-party integrations. These all things can be used for developing a website to fulfill all of your requirements. Drupal also comes with clean markup code which makes it easy for developers to manage content publishing. This makes it an affordable content management system with so many options available free of charge. As Drupal is open source, therefore, any web developer can work on it. There is no doubt that Drupal is worth the little money spent on its website.
Why we prefer Drupal over other Open Source CMSs? Drupal Key Features:-
1. Drupal Offers Reliability and Scalability
Drupal is highly reliable as we have already seen that so many large enterprise websites are running on Drupal. Drupal is also being adopted rapidly nowadays. Drupal 7 version was adopted by more than 1,00,000 websites in few months and Drupal 8 is adopted even faster and for right reasons. Drupal can easily handle high traffic, therefore, it is widely used for enterprises and world’s busiest websites.
If you are delivering the great digital experience to your customers and your website gets hit with lots of traffic and goes down then all your efforts will be wasted. Drupal can keep up and ensure that your site is available even when you are highly popular and attracting huge traffic to your site. Drupal right now powers more than a million sites worldwide. Large organizations like GE, Pfizer, and many other sites which experience extreme traffic bursts like the GRAMMY awards and NBC Olympics, run on Drupal. Drupal scalability means that even on the busiest days, your website will perform amazingly well and in a most reliable manner.
2. Drupal offers High Level of Security
Drupal has implemented the high level of security measures which are supported by regular security patches and updates from the developer’s community, led by Drupal’s security advisory team. Drupal enables you to prevent online hacking attempts. Also, you can manage the performance and security parameters easily from the admin panel. You can also install some essential Drupal security modules to enhance the security of your Drupal site. Along with this, if you install new security patches then your website will be highly protected. That’s why Whitehouse official website, NASA, CERN and London government – all of these websites which are sensitive to security are powered by Drupal only.
3. Drupal Takes Care of the Complexity of Your Site
Drupal enables developers to deploy and implement core features and functionality to complex web platforms with the help of additional customization options and features. Drupal is a modern web development platform and allows the creation and modification of large websites with a complex structure. Drupal also makes it easy to add classification terms and offers so many opportunities for the website extension and growth in future.
4. Drupal is Multilingual
The usefulness and flexibility of Drupal are proved by the fact that the basic functionality and modules come in more than 90 different languages. It covers most of the common language and the rare languages which you can think of for example Chinese, Arabic etc.
5. Drupal is Highly Flexible
Drupal is flexible to that extent that you can easily customize almost everything on your Drupal site. Without going through the complex efforts of implementing custom code, you can customize pages, forums, blogs, polls, fonts, images, colors, themes, designs, layouts and look and feel and much more.
6. Drupal is Highly SEO Friendly
Nowadays in the computer and internet space, wherever you see, you will see a lot of SEO friendly websites and social media elements like tweets, hashtags, profile posts and tagged photos. This shows how much important it has become to implement social media and SEO strategies into your website. Good news is that Drupal covers all of these and is a highly SEO friendly platform. Drupal contains many powerful additional SEO modules, modern web publishing tools and clean codes. These enable this CMS to offer developers with a wide range of third-party modules which can take your search engine optimization processes to a new height. As content is in focus hence SEO works effortlessly and without any issue. The additional SEO modules also allow you to take control of URLs easily while also taking less amount of time as compared to other CMS available in the market.
All of these reasons make Drupal the best choice for the media, news and publishing industry which is more concerned about the content and SEO of the site. Therefore so many large publishing companies have built their websites using Drupal.
Conclusion
As we have just discussed, there are so many reasons why Drupal is the best CMS ever. If you consider your website as an exhibition then Drupal is a colorful and rich painting which represents the whole event in itself. Drupal websites are also influenced by good and attractive things online and you can also use it to configure your own unique brand and company in the market. You can edit themes and customize each aspect of your website as per your personal vision and choice. Ultimately these things not only will help you in growing your business immensely but will also give you a clear competitive advantage in the market and finally take you ahead of everyone else.
We can say that there is not a single flaw or issue in the flexible, scalable, reliable and robust CMS platform Drupal although there are so many reasons why everyone like it. Whether you are a developer, enterprise or business client, you will not be left without being amazed by the benefits and features of Drupal. Drupal always keep itself up with the latest trends and technologies and can be termed as a platform which knows very well how to deliver the appropriate content at the appropriate time with any medium and on any device.