Too Drupal Or Not Too Drupal?

Digital agencies are able to provide a wide range of services to clients, all thanks to advanced CMSs available these days. At a time, they may be engaged in developing a b2b website for a business to share data with multiple vendors, or may be developing an e-commerce website for an online retail business. A lot of businesses prefer to have their Content Management System strategy built around Drupal due to various reasons.

Following are the 10 reasons for the popularity and preference of Drupal among digital agencies and businesses.

1. Now Drupal is Easy to Learn

Older versions of Drupal were considered fairly complex, especially for new users, as compared to other systems. But thanks to better online help service, dedicated IRC channels, and growing number of online forums, it has now become easier to learn how to have complete command over Drupal effectively. Apart from these, a lot of eBooks and instructional manual are available aimed at teaching developers of different expertise levels and familiarity with Drupal.

2. Drupal’s Growing Community

Drupal’s community of developers and users is constantly growing at a steady pace. Here are some recent statistics:

  • There are over 35,000 developer accounts and over 1,119,000 user accounts of Drupal.
  • The attendance semiannual Drupal conferences which are held at different locations in America and Europe has grown from 500 to 3,700 experts, from 2008 to up till now, showing the increasing support of developers all around the world.
  • Over 30 national communities from around the globe are offering a language-specific support to Drupal.
  • There has been a substantial increase seen in the active Drupal discussion groups, forums and mailing lists along with several IRC channels on the Freenode network.

3. Security Better than Any Other Platform

Security is, without a doubt, a highlighting point of Drupal. It is Drupal’s biggest differentiator from other platforms, as it provides enterprise level security and website scale. This is the reason why most high profile government websites are built using Drupal; for example, Whitehouse.gov.

4. Advanced URL Control

Drupal has a unique feature of providing precise control over URL structure, unlike any other platform. It provides the benefit of giving a custom URL to each item of content. URL structures can also be automated for each type of content with Pathauto Module. As compared to other CMSs, content pages in Drupal have ‘cleaner’ URLs.

5. Continuous Improvement

Drupal is an open source CMS and it is continuously being improved by the large community of developers who are currently using it for development. Technology updates and new features are introduced from time to time with greater refinements and lesser requirement for bug fixes. Constant iteration of Drupal ensures that it never gets antiquated.

6. Taxonomy

Drupal has a strong and robust taxonomy system that enables the users to organize and tag content. Each of Drupal’s set of categories can be restricted to specific content types, while it also offers the option of hierarchical categories, with multiple parent categories. The advanced taxonomy features of Drupal, which are combined with Views and CCK, enables the user to target all the potential long tail keywords easily that are researched using Wordtracker.

7. Third Party Integration

Drupal has now thousands of modules available, which makes it easier and quicker to integrate with third-party analytics services such as PiwikGoogle Analytics, and social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

8. Greater Accessibility

With Drupal’s latest 7.0 version (8 currently in testing phase), web accessibility has been enhanced significantly by the Drupal community. These improvements ensure better experience for both administrator and visitor sides of Drupal. Some highlighting improvements include:

  • Drag and drop functionality.
  • Option for adding labels for input forms by default.
  • Improved color intensity and contrast.
  • Consistent methods for fixing CSS display for exposing and hiding text under focus.
  • Adding skip navigation to Core themes.

9. Multi-lingual Support

Drupal currently supports 110 different languages with right to left integration for languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. Developers and users from all over the world are able to use Drupal, as its multi-language support feature strikes down all the linguistic barriers.

10. Documentation

Excellent documentation comprising of guidelines and instructions which includes official handbooks, numerous tutorials, videos, podcasts, blogs, massive API Reference and the Pro Drupal Development book

Article Provided By: Cometchat

Web Design, Web Development, Web Graphics, Website Designer, Developer, Development, Greenville, SC, SEO
If you would like to discuss Your Drupal Ecommerce Website with Mojoe.net or your website’s analytics, custom logo designs, social media, website, web application, need custom programming, or IT consultant, please do not hesitate to call us at 864-859-9848 or you can email us at dwerne@mojoe.net.