The Drupal Website Advantage

Creating a website with a content management system in today’s web world is almost a necessity. In the web of yesteryear, we used to make sites like we make brochures; if we need to include some new information, we open up the file and change it and then upload it to the website. Content Management Systems such as Drupal or WordPress save us the hassle of finding files, copying them, and uploading them.

In today’s web world, a Content Management System makes it easy: you just login and make the change. You don’t need to keep track of files. You don’t need to have a fancy program to edit websites. You don’t even need to know programming or HTML. A content management system has the data and the editor all built in. You just log in and change the data.

Systems like WordPress are great when you want a site with a couple pages that don’t change very much and a blog with more quickly-changing content. But what happens when you want to add a whole new section to your site? For example, if you want to add a discussion forum to the site? WordPress has an add-on called BbPress. Want to add a calendar of events? A basic online store? You will have to install/purchase a whole new system to manage that data effectively. Unless you use Drupal.

Drupal has a large community of thousands of users. Drupal is used for all kinds of sites with all different kinds of data. And thus, the Drupal community has created hundreds of add-ons for specific needs. Instead of spending your time creating a new section of the site to house your forum or calendar, you just add and configure the feature within Drupal. Also, instead of having a number of systems to log in to manage your site’s data, Drupal is the one and only system.

For some specific features for your site, Drupal may not have a pre-built way to manage or display that data. But that does not necessarily mean that you need to create a new site to manage that data. Drupal is a very flexible content management system. Data structures can be built up directly within Drupal and displayed in a number of different ways in different parts of the site, much of it without writing a line of PHP code. Other content management systems would require a developer’s involvement for much more basic tasks, but with a bit of training about managing content within Drupal, you can have the developers work on making the finer, customized details of your site.

After you’ve created a successful Drupal website, your site can also grow in use. When the numbers of viewers gets into the thousands per day, Drupal and the Drupal developer community have tools to manage that. Drupal includes options for caching of data to make the site load faster, but also includes integration with more advanced cache management systems. Even some big, top websites use Drupal, such as Grammy.comm, Examiner.com, and The Economist, among many others.

Are you interesting in using Drupal for your website or learning more about the benefits?

August Ash has worked hard to become a trusted Minneapolis Drupal site design resource. Take 30 seconds to contact us now and let our designers do the heavy lifting.