With Drupal, you can create and manage versatile websites. Modular and customizable, but with a lean basic version, the open source CMS is just as suitable for your small blogs as it is for extensive company websites. What are the special features and benefits of Drupal? You can find out here.
Is Drupal a CMS?
Yes, Drupal is a content management system (CMS) that helps you create and manage your website. Interestingly, it originally started in 2000 as social software for a student dormitory.
Since the source code was released as open source in 2001, Drupal has evolved rapidly. Thanks to countless extensions, it is now one of the most powerful systems in the world. Renowned institutions such as NASA, Tesla and the universities of Harvard and Oxford rely on it. Drupal remains true to its roots: to this day, it supports the social software approach through active communities that promote exchange and further develop the system together.
What can Drupal do?
As a Drupal agency, we would like to say: everything! Because Drupal covers a very broad spectrum of website requirements. The basic version consists of a comparatively lean core, which you can expand with additions from almost 50,000 modules and plug-ins (for all previous versions) to create a website with highly individual functions and services.
In this way, Drupal can be used to implement a wide variety of applications for you, such as websites for companies, organizations and institutions of various sizes, blogs, online magazines and stores, communities, e-learning platforms and intranet applications. The formats can also be combined. Everything is conceivable here, from small with manageable functions to very complex and large amounts of data and content. The further development of Drupal is ongoing - the 10th version of this highly versatile and flexible content management system has already been released.
Advantages of Drupal
It really is the versatility that characterizes Drupal. The community is correspondingly broadly based, and in addition to multiple functional developments, this also ensures open source quality when it comes to security. Regular updates ensure compliance with high standards - which makes it all the more important for you to install them promptly. Here we have compiled further benefits that make the use of Drupal as a CMS attractive for you.
What you benefit from with Drupal:
- License freedom: With Drupal, there are no costs due to license agreements - however, professional and therefore chargeable support may be required for a smooth implementation.
- High scalability: The modular configuration gives you enormous scope for creating individual websites with a wide variety of applications.
- Performance: Drupal allows you to manage multiple sites and ensures performance, e.g. through integrated caching mechanisms.
- Flexible role management: The integrated assignment option for roles and authorizations allows you to work individually, for example for defined users directly in the frontend.
- Long-term solution: Drupal adapts - even to your changing requirements - and is therefore a reliable solution for you in the long term. Would you like to add an online store to your weblog or website, for example? Drupal Commerce offers numerous e-commerce integrations.
- Multilingualism: Drupal has translation management and allows you to output the website in different languages.
- Marketing & SEO: Integrations of various marketing tools are offered, including HubSpot, Marketo and Inxmail, as well as business platforms such as LinkedIn. Various SEO features such as speaking URLs, meta tag optimization, XML sitemap generation, image SEO and more increase the findability of your site.
Are there any disadvantages of Drupal?
Drupal's versatility and the large number of modules open up possibilities for extensive and complex websites. However, this flexibility can also lead to difficulties at one point or another, for example with the following factors:
- Complexity: The more complex the page structure and the use of different applications, the steeper the learning curve for employees who manage the content of your website.
- Increased effort for updates and upgrades: More complex updates - especially cross-version updates - can lead to incompatibilities with themes or plug-ins and cause additional development costs for you.
- Resource requirements: In comparison, Drupal requires more resources (server, memory and computing power) - otherwise there is a risk of longer loading times with high traffic on your website.
- Support: This is where the community comes in - and not all users are happy with that. If you prefer to pick up the phone when problems arise and prefer quick solutions, you should consider a licensed model with the corresponding services.
- Design: Drupal provides a large number of themes, but customization is rather time-consuming and cost-intensive for you.
So we see: license-free initially saves costs. However, to ensure that everyone involved can work smoothly with the system, the core, extensions and plug-ins must be properly installed and professionally updated. This applies in particular to security updates. If your company does not have the capacity for this, support from external developers is necessary. Also important: in-depth training when introducing Drupal.
Is Drupal right for your website project?
Drupal is your CMS if you want to remain flexible and rely on the long-term availability of various extensions for your website. From website to store, as well as building a community and setting up member management? Drupal can do that. But internationally and multilingually operating companies, authorities or institutions are also very well advised to use Drupal - especially if they need complex websites with strict security and accessibility requirements. The integration of other systems via APIs, modules or custom developments is possible without any problems.
We have also explained in detail how to find the right system for your individual requirements in our webinar "Choosing the right CMS for your website". Take a look to get a deeper insight into the decision criteria!
