Drupal Website Development

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What is Drupal?

taken from Wikipedia

Drupal is a free & open source Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP. It is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to most CMSs. These include the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts, administration menus, RSS-feeds, customizable layout, flexible account privileges, logging, a blogging system, an Internet forum, and options to create a classic brochureware website or an interactive community website. Drupal was also designed to allow new features and custom behavior to be added by third parties. For this reason, Drupal is sometimes described as a content management framework. Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.

Why should we use Drupal for our website?

Drupal is considered by many to be the premier open source content management framework that exists. Choosing your framework of your website is a big decision, which should not be taken lightly. You are essentially committing to this framework for the life of your current website, but the life of your future website. Should your existing framework not be suitable for things you would like to accomplish in the future, you will either have to switch, or develop something custom. Both of these options will be time consuming and costly. This is why it's important to choose something which can grow with your business.

1. Feature Rich

Drupal is a modular framework. This means that functionality can be plugged in and removed easily. Drupal.org has over 2600 modules free and open source modules which you can leverage to add features to your site. Want to add a blog in the future? No problem, use the Blog module. Want to start selling your products online? No problem, use the Ubercart E-Commerce module. Google Maps? Twitter? YouTube? Drupal modules have you covered. Drupal has a culture and community of developers who extend Drupal with modules and submit improvements and bug fixes constantly. Over the years when the Drupal community realizes a certain feature should be used by everyone it's integrated into the Drupal "core". The "core" is the base set of modules which Drupal provides. Out of the box, Drupal deals with user registration and permissions. It provides you with the ability to create, edit and delete your content. It contains a flexible and feature rich system of organizing your content called Taxonomies. If your readers still can't find the content they're looking for there's a search. Drupal provides a robust comment system that allows your readers to engage your websites content. There's a translation interface for running your website in multiple languages. Starting with a framework which is feature rich and easily extend-able allows us to provide you with more goodies, faster and cheaper than if we had to develop everything from scratch ourselves. You end up with more for less.

2. Flexible

Drupal was built to be extensible and because of this it needs to be flexible. Drupal was build with flexibility in mind. This flexibility can be leveraged to do staged development, reducing start up costs and initial development time. You can add features to your website later easily, quickly and cheaper than if you used a less flexible framework. If you're interested in having your website grow with your business this is important. Choosing an open source product provides you with additional flexibility. Because of the license Drupal uses (GPL), we are forced to provide you with all the code for all the work we've done for you. You are not required to provide this code to anyone (unless you sell it to someone else). Should you want to extend your website in the future, you are able to do so. Should you not have the ability to do this in-house you again can leverage the army of Drupal developers which exist on the Internet. We adhere to strict standards when we develop our Drupal sites, so any other developer should easily extend the functionality of your website.

3. Cutting Edge

Drupal will always be cutting edge. Drupal has a philosophy between major version releases of improving and innovating. The differences between Drupal 4 to Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 have been massive. Drupal 7 will bring to the table huge interface usability improvements and RDFa support into core. Keeping yourself cutting edge isn't always important, but it's nice to know it's an option. The ability to extend Drupal with modules and the fact that it's an open project supported by a massive community of developers means that when something new comes out, you can bet that someone has already started writing a module for it. This means that after you launch your website, it's not sitting around collecting dust, but that you've got a community of people behind the scenes who are always improving the old and creating the new.

Photo taken from buyaert.net

I don't believe you

Packt publishing, a company who publishes developer books on open projects has voted Drupal the #1 open source CMS in 2008 and 2007. In 2006, they were #2. They've also been a winner in CNet's webware 100 3 years in a row.

Who uses Drupal?

Lots of people and companies are starting to understand that moving off a proprietary system and onto a more open and socially built framework will allow them to continue to grow. Major companies are taking note.