Drupal CMS
Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems in use today. With it, we can create a variety of community-driven sites, including blogs, forums, wiki-style sites, and much more. Drupal is also considered to be a content management framework. This means that instead of the software being specialized for building certain types of websites it can be used to build any type of website you want. Drupal is left open and generalized intentionally. You can use the included tools to piece together and create a seemingly endless array of websites, widgets, news programs, or whatever: the possibilities are up to the programmer like us.
Why Drupal?
Drupal is an excellent choice for your website if you need your web site flexible enough to evolve over time. It is not uncommon to begin with a blog site and find out later that you want to add a forum or a Wiki entry. You can easily configure Drupal to interact with other websites to allow speedy customization based on user query.
Drupal Pros
When you edit a Drupal page, the administration page and the page users see are almost identical. The only difference is that the administration page has menus for page customization. Many programmers find this extremely helpful and much easier than other programs such as Frontpage, Dreamweaver, or Joomla. Being open source makes the program free.
Drupal Cons
As of the time of this writing, Drupal 5 and 6 are not nearly as user-friendly to administer as WordPress, or Joomla; However, Drupal is making great strides in this area for Drupal 7 and through the Acquia project. Because it has a steeper learning curve than WordPress and is significantly more complex, building and maintaining a Drupal site will likely be expensive than a simple WordPress site. However, the functionality and value you can add using Drupal can easily justify the price in most cases.
Drupal Performance
To increase your Drupal site performance we would upgrade your Drupal 5 site to Drupal 6 using best practice upgrade paths. We would back up and maintain your Drupal 6 site using core and contributed modules and utilities, configure the Drupal core and contributed modules for high traffic. Run core Drupal page compression, CSS and JS compression, and use Drupal page caching. Run scheduled cron tasks to perform crucial garbage-collection processes. Use the Development module to monitor page loads and queries. Use the Boost module for anonymous page caching, tweak Boost settings, and use Boost blocks and advanced Boost settings to monitor site performance Install and use Memcache API and Integration module, and Authcache and Advanced Cached modules to enhance and monitor site performance.
Bottomline
Some of the most important aspects of building a website or a community are the abilities to have:
- New Features
- Reports and Statistics
- Customization
- Rapid development and deployment
Whatever the task, odds are that Drupal can handle it, or a new module can be created or an existing one can be customized to handle it. Not too long ago, this kind of in depth interactivity would cost 100s of thousands of dollars and take many months to achieve, perhaps even requiring a team of developers.
The invention and creation of newer and superior technology is so rapid today that developers need to be within a network of technically savvy software communities. Your investment in a Website should be viable for the future – not obsolete within a few months.Drupal is also the best insurance that you will be ready when you get requests for new features. The contributed modules are a treasure trove of nearly every feature you could want. We choose Drupal because it is a full featured fully customizable freely available open source framework, structured in a way that allows us to create interactive communities, while being a part of the drupal community. But as always, it will really depend on your requirements and budget to decide what kind of CMS solution will be best for you.
