There are a lot of options to choose from when considering what platform to build your company’s website on. If you're not familiar with CMSes, or content management systems, learn about what a CMS is why it's a necessity for your brand's website.

In this article, we’ll break down the top 5 reasons why we believe Drupal is the ideal CMS for businesses that are serious about integrating their website into their overall business processes.

5. Secure

Drupal takes security very seriously. From the start, the founders of Drupal thought about making their code strong and as free of vulnerabilities as possible. Many times, I’ve seen developers and product owners consider security as a second thought, a down-the-road step-stone, but it’s very important to address these from day one, or they will never be addressed until it’s too late. Security patches go out to the public as soon as vulnerabilities are discovered, which helps developers and agencies like ours be proactive and update your Drupal business website immediately to protect you from any possible attacks.

4. Built by Developers, for Developers

If you were to download Drupal today, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were somewhat lost or you did not see the value of it. That’s because, by itself, it comes off as very bare. This, though, is ideal because it’s like having the foundations to build your house on. It’s the minimum elements necessary to create an amazing Drupal enterprise solution. 

It’s not for everyone. You must be a developer to build upon Drupal. There is no easy-install, out-of-the-box solution like WordPress. I believe this is what makes it so powerful. Instead of thinking about how novice people would use it, the creators of Drupal built it so that developers, with deep knowledge of programming architecture, could use it to build incredible custom websites - websites that are form-fitted to your business’s needs and processes.

3. Flexible & Maintainable

Websites can be hard to change, maintain, and update, especially when you don't use a CMS. At Herosmyth, we build of all of our websites so that they can be easily changed by our clients. That requires a short training session on a few unique concepts that Drupal provides: Content-Types, Views, and Blocks. These are the core of making a custom website design.

As the name implies, Content-Types are buildable types of content. For example, a “page” is a type with some attributes like title and body. Another one can be blog, which title, body, author, and tags.

Views is an amazing UI-based query builder which enables you to display a list of content in many different ways. An easy example would be the Blog page that lists all your blog articles, ordered by date and paginated.

Blocks are small pieces of content that can be shown and moved into different sections of your website, making it really easy for business owners to update certain sections without breaking the layout.

Drupal also provides a hook system where 3rd party modules can integrate with all of Drupal’s functions and change virtually everything (even other modules) without ever touching the Drupal core code. This is extremely useful for extending and encapsulation.

Lastly, it’s about documentation. Very often, we take documentation for granted, and a lot of junior developers tend not to write any at all. When you think about an open source project, documentation is a must, and the Drupal community does a good job of enforcing it, making Drupal web development an enjoyable experience!

 

2. Open Source and Robust

Open source is the core of why Drupal is so successful. It’s built upon a smart and engaging community. They don’t mind spending some of their free time to make a successful, free product that everyone can enjoy. At Herosmyth, our Drupal developers are proud to contribute fixes, new modules, or themes; in fact, we encourage it.

It’s a big misconception among enterprise businesses that open source means bad code, no support, no structure, or no documentation. The Drupal community is nothing like that; it’s actually the opposite. When submitting a module, for example, you have to go through an extensive review process where other Drupal developers take a look at your code for consistency, security, scalability, and whether something similar exists already. After that, there are several additional steps before your module gets fully approved, which makes every module out there very robust and trustworthy.

1. World Wide Contributors

Last but not least, number one goes to the sheer amount of Drupal developers out there. With over 38,000 of them, Drupal is one of the most contributed-to content management systems in the world. This makes Drupal the preferred CMS for many businesses that need a custom website solution that is robust, SEO friendly, and easy to update.

As of today, these are some cool statistics about Drupal:

• 30,748 Modules
• 2,129 Themes
• 930 Distributions
• 38,479 Developers

Get the latest updates on https://www.drupal.org.

Cartoon credit to Oliver Widder, the creator of the Geek and Poke cartoon series.