Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) that is used the world over by individuals, community groups and enterprises to easily publish, manage and organise a wide variety of content on the web. Hundreds of thousands of people and organisations are using Drupal to power everything from personal blogs through social networking and e-commerce sites to corporate and government websites.
The built-in functionality of Drupal, combined with thousands of freely available add-on modules, enables features such as:
- Electronic commerce
- Blogs
- Collaborative authoring environments (‘wikis’)
- Forums
- Newsletters
- Podcasting
- Surveys and polls
- Events calendars and booking
- Image and multimedia galleries
- File uploads and downloads, and online document management
Drupal is not just a CMS, but a powerful development framework, and it is particularly suited for organisations needing specialised applications related to their website. Applications can include such things as intranet or extranet sites, business to business collaboration sites, and online project or customer relationship management systems.
The advantages of building your website or web-based application in Drupal include:
- it is the most widely supported open source CMS and the platform of choice for projects of many sizes, right up to high profile sites like the Obama White House website (www.whitehouse.gov) and The Economist (www.economist.com)
- it is not just a CMS, but a full application framework with an extensible code base
- built-in features such as user profile management, role-based permissions and security, and a powerful taxonomy system for categorising content
- many high-quality modules available for add-on capabilities
The advantage of building a website associated applications in Drupal over a custom-built system include:
- the resources required to match quality of Drupal code would be enormous
- Drupal is hardened by years of widespread use and developer contributions
- Drupal is extremely secure and infinitely scalable
- a site built in Drupal is not tied to one developer and proprietary technologies, but can be supported by any developer familiar with its open standards technologies such as HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL
For more information about Drupal, see drupal.org or contact us.