10 Reasons to Drupal in 2014
While WordPress remains the most popular open source web CMS, Drupal is quickly gaining ground in terms of ease of use while remaining far and away the better choice in terms of customisation and power. Expert Market’s Web Design & Developer consultant, Ian Wright, gives 10 reasons why you should consider Drupal for your next web project in 2014.
1. Open Source And Can Be Used License Free
One of the fundamental benefits of using Drupal is that it’s open source and can be used without buying a license. This means you have more money to build your business.
2. Huge Number of Free Modules
What’s better than free software? Free software that has thousands of extensions that are also free. As of publication there were 23,911 free modules to extend the functionality and power of any Drupal installation.
3. Custom Look and Feel With Themes
Want to make your site look and feel unique? Drupal offers more than 1800 themes that can be used out of the box with your site, again all for free. Not happy with the default set? Then you can hire a designer to build a custom solution just for you.
4. Built For Multi-Author/Multi-User Sites
While WordPress might be great for a one man blog, it doesn’t scale well for multi-author sites. Drupal is built to be used by teams of people right from the get go. This means you can seamlessly collaborate on web projects from one common interface.
5. Great for Multi-Lingual/Location Based Sites
Not only is Drupal built for multiple authors and users it’s also built to allow you to set up sites that target a certain region or language. For example, want to set-up separate sites for the US, UK and France? With Drupal it’s easy and as a bonus you can share the underlying codebase between each site, saving you time and money.
6. Follows Standards
Drupal is built to meet existing web standards across of range of categories. This includes the integration of HTML5 for responsive design to connecting to databases in the backend. If you need your CMS to work with another web based system, Drupal should be your choice.
7. API Allows For Custom Coding
Not happy with any of the features of your site? Well Drupal is great for allowing custom code across all levels of the site. This includes themes, modules and back-end systems. It’s a web developer’s dream come true. All aspects of the site can be made to work exactly as you want.
8. Documentation and Developer Community
Not sure how to do the custom coding mentioned above. Well you could always hire a web designer, but if that’s not in the budget why not look into the extensive documentation available for just about every problem. Can’t find an answer? Look to the Drupal and/or Stack Exchange communities for help.
9. Security
Web security is one of the most important considerations for any web project. No matter how big or small, you want to make sure you maintain control over it and that it can’t be ruined by someone else. This is one of the biggest selling points of Drupal. The community constantly tests Drupal’s security readiness. As a result problems are usually found out before they’ve had a chance to be exploited in the wild.
10. Enormously Scalable
While all the features above make Drupal a wonderful choice the one thing that places it head and shoulders above other solutions is how scalable it is. 71 out the top 100 Universities in the world use Drupal because it can scale to meet their needs. Not to mention The Economist and Whitehouse.gov have also chosen to use Drupal for their web needs. Drupal is the best solution for large scale sites available today. To learn more about websites that have been built using it be sure to look at the case studies or read more about Drupal right here on Webdesign.org.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
