Today, the explosion in content creation is more than ever before with its growing role in marketing strategy & analysis, tapping new opportunities and reaching new prospects. Now, the way content is generated for different platforms for better web experiences is, obviously, bringing new challenges for enterprises in terms of quick content delivery with proper quality, and at preferably lower cost. To be consistent with these challenges, everyday companies take new approaches.
But, building websites with features that speed-up content delivery process, integrate seamlessly with third-party apps for content sharing, replicate content on several DBs to keep new content in sync, as well as give better capability to handle traffic surges… come with unique challenges. And when you work at bigger scale, the question of having a robust system do arises. If you are a non-tech savvy person, what irks you most in managing your website: coding new pages from a template, copying the file to the FTP server, manually linking to other pages and much more. And, if you have to update content frequently, definitely it is going to be a big hassle. Such hassles are driving businesses to adopt a content management solution that would increase efficiency, improve control of information, and reduce the overall cost of information management for the enterprise.
Open source CMS Frameworks like Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla are quite popular in their own terms, but if you want more than just a ‘Blog’ site, there is almost no boundary to what you can build with Drupal. The growth of Drupal for last many years has been phenomenal at many fronts. The nice thing about Drupal is the way it enables us to build simple, reliable and secure web sites. The biggest adoption point for Drupal is its flexibility of customization, limitless expansion hooks, a huge library of modules, and powerful tools for code-free construction. It enables you add functionality and features such as e-commerce, forums, media, search, geographic data, dates, workflow, messaging, forms, social networking. Beyond that you can customize the interface using templates, CSS, etc. Drupal as a standalone has also done some awesome work at enterprise level.
If we have to evaluate any CMS’s capability at enterprise-level, majorly the following factors are benchmark and Drupal is good enough to address them.
Scalability: Drupal’s scalability has been tested by many enterprises and you can deploy this open source CMS on a single server or across a load-balanced, distributed server cluster to tackle huge traffic surges. The Economist website which is built with Drupal, is a good example which has over 3 million registered users and 30 million page views per month.
Independent and Reliable: Drupal is Platform, Web Server and Database independent. While the standard install configuration is on Linux, Apache and MySQL or PostgreSQL, you can also easily install on Windows servers running IIS and Microsoft SQL Server, Solaris, BSD or Mac OS X as per your needs. Drupal is ideally deployed on a LAMP stack using the Linux OS, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP programming language.
Security: Drupal’s core modules are quite robust to avert common security vulnerabilities defined by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). A special Drupal security team is continuously monitoring and addressing security vulnerability with Drupal core.
Extendibility and Interoperability: You can extend Drupal the way you want and it can easily integrate with other web applications such as Payment Services, CRM, Social Networks, ERP, GeoLocation tools and many more through open standards and web services like XML, REST and JSON.
Localization and Multi-Lingual: Drupal’s capabilities allow translating the user interface into different languages and creating different date formats for each language.
Community Strength: A community of 630,000+ users and developers across the globe constantly develops and maintains Drupal. Drupal developers have been the major force behind its roaring success, in extending its ability as well as keeping this platform up to date with the latest technology.
The below screen shows Drupal’s awesomeness and its adoption in government sector.
However, as with growing web experiences, new models are rapidly evolving that leave us with room for more customization and optimization. Drupal is quite flexible and robust (used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide) as your CMS of choice for content, products, groups, images, users, videos and other large scale work. But before you start ‘gluing’ and ‘crafting’ together an amazing website on any CMS, it is important to define your needs and objectives of website. And, if you find hard in choosing a better CMS platform, we, at DrupalCube, are just one step away.
We are also attending DrupalCon Portland 2013, so if you are in and around Portland…come and meet us for networking, informal conversations, and more.