Why we love Drupal
Since our very start in 2009 we’ve relied on the CMS Drupal for most of our websites. We guess it’s high time for a little love letter.
Since our very start in 2009 we’ve relied on the CMS Drupal for most of our websites. We guess it’s high time for a little love letter.
What is Drupal?
Drupal is a CMS, which is short for Content Management System and generally refers to software that allows you to create, edit and organize digital content. The content can vary from simple texts to interactive, multimedia formats, but the end goal is usually a website. A good CMS usually has a pretty intuitive user interface, so that you can manage your online presence without any programming skills. There are entry-level systems like Wix or Jimdoo, which are great for small blogs or stores - and more complex systems like Adobe Experience Manager or Site Core, which can manage large amounts of data for big, multilingual websites. At Sergeant, however, we love Drupal. And here are a few of the reasons why:
1. Drupal can handle complex websites
Of course it can do the small and lean ones too. But Drupal's advantages simply shine on large, data-heavy websites. Drupal supports any kind of content, from blog posts to polls to forums. And it has a very flexible taxonomy, which means you can group and structure the content in almost endless combinations. What’s more, Drupal allows you to determine exactly which users can customize which content (and to what degree). This is particularly helpful for large websites with different access rights (such as editors, logged-in users and anonymous visitors).
→ Scaling up painlessly
You don’t have to go big right away. Drupal is great at starting small and growing bigger. As the site grows or traffic increases, Drupal scales seamlessly. For instance, it is often necessary to integrate third-party software into a site (like Google Maps, social media platforms, or bookmarking sites). Drupal always has the right module up its sleeve. The CMS was designed with module addition in mind, so that the interfaces to modules work well and you can expand the functionality of your website.
→ Never Lost in Translation
While other CMSs often require plugins for additional language versions, Drupal is a multilingual genius. The "Multilingual Content" module includes 100 languages to choose from and offers translation support. For international companies, c'est juste très cool.
2. Drupal is not a company, but a community
Drupal is free and open source. This means that all code is freely available to developers. They can simply take it as is, or they can adapt it to their specific needs (which most do). While so many cooks would probably spoil the broth, Drupal is continuously improved by its large community. Developers offer their new solutions to the community and provide support when something doesn't work. And they develop the specific things they need - kind of like a direct democracy of coding.
→ Custom-made is the new black
Those who work with Drupal do not use the same templates over and over again. Instead, the CMS can be adapted to completely individual needs. This allows for websites that are unique in both design and functionality. "That's clearly a Drupal website!" is a phrase we've never heard before. With other CMSs, customization often involves greater extra effort.
→ Support from the best
The Drupal community is not a loose group of friends who meet for Zoom coffee chats on Wednesdays. Because Drupal, while being open source from the start, was created for professional programmers. This has resulted in a very active community full of experts who are constantly codg new modules (plugins), fixing bugs, writing extensive documentation, sharing ideas in forums and chat rooms, and providing support to users every day. And all of this for free.
Drupal is secure
A secure CMS protects against data theft and password spying, which means you should probably prioritize security when choosing a CMS for your web project. And since the Drupal Security Team meets on a weekly basis to maintain and improve the security level, Drupal is widely considered a secure CMS.
→ The door has a lot of locks
Being able to define different roles with varying access rights is what makes Drupal so practical for big content platforms. But it also makes a website more secure. User profiles can be defined according to individual needs without jeopardizing the security of the entire website.
→ Bugs are fixed quickly
Security reports are regularly posted on the official Drupal website. And the developers in the community have a reputation for working particularly fast and hard to keep the system up and running at all times.
→ Encrypting databases is no problem
Some sites require a higher level of security than others (like sites that store customer or credit card information). For these cases, Drupal can be configured with a high level of database encryption. If there’s no need to encrypt the entire database, specific information can be encrypted individually. Just lock up what you don't want to get out.
What about Wordpress?
Don't worry, love is not making us blind. Even though this is a long-term thing for us, we are well aware Drupal has its weaknesses. For one, it is not necessarily a walk in the park for beginners. Our developers manage to create beautifully intuitive user interfaces for our clients to work with, but when it comes to the big changes, only the professionals should be allowed on site. And Drupal's small market share is not always an advantage. As far as up-to-date, working plugins are concerned, Wordpress sites get a broader selection to choose from. Simply because there are way more Wordpress sites around.
On the other hand, Drupal is better than Wordpress at handling sites that require user permissions (e.g. platforms with different user profiles). It has stronger caching capabilities, and is more flexible when it comes to API development (i.e. programming interfaces such as database access).
So you see, there is no universal answer. The ideal CMS for a website often depends on the planned size and functionality of said site. Design plays a secondary role, because our development team can create beautiful websites with Wordpress and with Drupal.
We’d love to continue, but this post is way too long already
Drupal is free, open source, versatile, secure, professional, widely supported and independent. But it brings a whole lot of other benefits that are beyond the scope of this post. Maybe one of these days we'll make a part 2. Or maybe, from now on, we'll just continuously work on this blogpost, improving it, correcting small errors, and adding to it tirelessly. After all, that's what the Drupal community has taught us.
