Drupal is a free and open source Content Management System (CMS) that allows you to create custom websites, blogs, portals, and more without writing any code. It is a tool that helps you organise, manage and publish your content on your website using an intuitive user interface. It is packed with features that help you create beautiful digital experiences with highly customizable, dynamic, content-driven, scalable, and fully functional websites.
What is Content Management System?
The Content Management System (CMS) is a software that allows you to store and manage all your digital content (such as text, photos, music, documents, etc.). More specifically it is a software tool that allows users to create, add, publish, edit, control, or remove content from a website, using a graphical user interface (GUI) on a laptop, computer or tablet. Its Graphical User Interface (GUI) is user-friendly and makes interacting with the back end of the software much easier.
Drupal has a simple WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor called the CKeditor that allows content managers, writers, editors, and site admins with no HTML or coding experience to add content easily. Just like a word doc you can also add images, formatting, and hyperlinks by using simple menu buttons.
It is an open source content management platform offered under a General Public License (GPL) which means the source code is available with a license. Hence this allows anyone to download, modify, collaborate, and share it freely with others. A worldwide community continues to work and develop this software without any restrictions on modifications and extensions as well as readily help each other make the best use of it. Hence modules and plugins are available for nearly every possible need.
Drupal is a CMS based on the LAMP stack(the combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) that requires PHP programming language and hence can be configured on any web server that supports the PHP programming language, e.g., Apache, Nginx, Microsoft IIS, etc. The operating system can be Windows, Mac OS, or Linux and the database can be PostgreSQL, SQLite, MySQL, or a MySQL-compatible replacement such as MariaDB or Percona.
The software is ready to use upon download with a web-based installer and many additional modules and themes that can be downloaded from the Drupal.org website, allowing the entire look and feel of the website to be easily changed with additional functionalities.
Why use Drupal?
Drupal is an incredibly powerful framework and is often the best choice for complex, content-heavy, and high-traffic websites. When it comes to organizing large amounts of data and content, it is extremely powerful, flexible, functional, and secure. Hence it is a great option for those looking to build an enterprise-level solution or site with large resource libraries and databases. It is more suited to large and complex sites that contain multiple forms of content, features, functionality, and integrations.
It has grown to a popular CMS and is the preferred choice for government agencies, large associations, and many Fortune 500 companies such as WhiteHouse.gov, World Economic Forum, Stanford University, Examiner.com, and many more.
Here are some of the features you can avail when using this platform:
· Creating and editing content with WYSIWYG editor using a well-designed authoring environment that includes page layout capabilities.
· Drupal translates pages and other assets with built-in user interfaces.
· Drupal has several modules that allow you to publish your content on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and other social mediums. By default it also installs forums, commenting, polls, blogging, RSS feed aggregation, and rich user profiles that come with a range of modules and custom development.
· Drupal provides search engine connection capabilities that can be customized with standard or advanced mode features such as permanent links to content, customisable page metadata, and an automatically generated XML sitemap.
· Drupal has a built-in media ecosystem that allows to manage and handle content types including video, text, blog, menu handling, real-time statistics, etc.
· Drupal is easy to manage, structure, find and reuse content for your blog or website. It helps to organize content with categories and listing pages as well as moving blocks of content to different areas of the page.
· Drupal provides over 2000 themes that give your website an attractive look. It also comes with well-designed and responsive templates that help you build simple or complicated web applications without needing to start from scratch.
· Drupal has over 7000 plug-ins that can help you easily expand and boost the functionality of your website. Being an open source software, you can also create your own plugins as per the requirements of your website.
· Drupal’s built-in security is strongly supported by regular security patches and updates from the developer’s community. Additionally, you can also install some essential Drupal security modules to enhance the security of your Drupal site. It regularly provides detailed security reports and in case of any security issue, you can directly report to the Drupal team.
· The multi-lingual feature of Drupal provides the benefit of more than 90 different languages which comes as a boon for organisations around the globe that are in need of launching their websites that are tailored to a variety of language needs.
· Drupal is highly SEO-friendly and contains many powerful additional SEO modules like Nodewords, path redirect, Search 404, and Path/Auto path that can make your website SEO-friendly. The additional SEO modules also allow you to take control of URLs in that you can create individual URLs for the different content you create instead of one common URL. With Drupal’s in-built taxonomy you can create content and tag individual content with rich keywords. Categorization makes the content of a website reader-friendly and Drupal’s flexible and simple-to-use taxonomy makes your webpage SEO-friendly. Drupal’s page title module automatically creates page titles that are interesting for the search engine and grabs the attention of the readers.
Though Drupal is an advanced CMS system offering plenty of features and functions yet it is not known as the easiest framework to learn. Being a new user, you might find the software intimidating at first since it doesn’t do a whole lot on initial install without more configuration and setup. Considering its complexity, this is not a simple task for an amateur site builder, as compared to other CMS as it requires advanced knowledge of PHP and HTML languages as well as CSS. Due to this Drupal receives some amount of criticism and negative feedback. Some of the widely discussed disadvantages are:
Disadvantages
· Advanced Interface: Since Drupal was initially developed for web professionals, the professional construction system of Drupal can make it difficult to master. Due to the complex interface, less proficient users will find managing it a challenge without developer assistance. The script is not very user-friendly, hence requires advanced technical know-how about the platform to install and modify.
· Steep learning curve: Drupal development isn’t the best choice for web beginners as the developer has to learn a lot to crack the basic functions of the system. It does require some basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and PHP just in order to manage the site. While it will not take long to master the basic functions of the system, implementation and customization of the Drupal framework require years of experience and expertise. Although there is a vast range of themes and modules (plugins) available you need to search and find what fits your purpose. Most Drupal website themes are custom-coded which means you will need to modify the themes available to match your website requirement and most of the modules (plugins) don’t come free and need to be purchased. Hence be prepared to read a lot of documentation to fully understand the basic Drupal framework.
· High system requirements: Drupal requires quite a specific list of operating system and software requirements as it is not compatible with other software being a new content management system. It uses a considerable amount of memory and can create performance issues on a server. The website which is built using Drupal will generate big server loads as it loads its large modules on every request and will open only with high-speed internet connection. Hence it is more hardware-intensive, and you have to be ready to handle the expense of upgrading a server and the overall server infrastructure to deploy Drupal in the first place. This will without doubt include expensive hosting fees.
Conclusion
Due to its flexibility and versatile functionality, Drupal can be used to run just about anything you would want on the web. It is one of the best choices if your website requires a complex structure and massive amounts of data. You can always hire professional Drupal developers as the outcome is worth all the money, effort, and hassle. The Drupal developer community is a dedicated one and has shown an increasing commitment to make Drupal more user-friendly with each new version and provide support to other communities as well.
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