Depending on their professional expertise or what they have heard or learned about the CMS, various people have varying reactions when they hear the word “Drupal.” Over time, Drupal CMS has transformed from a basic hobbyist tool to a potent digital experience platform for big businesses. Drupal is often described as a content management framework that provides for extensibility & scalability with the addition of numerous user-created modules that build upon its basic structure, despite Dries’ description of it as a platform for “ambitious digital experiences.”
Every two years since Drupal 8 and its adoption of continuous innovation, new features, and contemporary libraries have been added. With the release of Drupal 9.1.0, the first feature (minor) release of Drupal 9, several of Drupal 9’s strategic ambitions have already been completed. Drupal always fulfills its promises. Whether large or small, every organization seeks this out in a CMS.
Popularity
One of the most well-liked CMSs now on the market, Drupal is the CMS of choice for many Fortune 500 corporations, government organizations, sizable associations, and non-profits. Currently, Drupal is used to power over 1,738,777 websites worldwide.
This graph shows the trend for the terms “Drupal” and “Joomla” over three years, and it amply illustrates the rise in popularity of Drupal.
Features for Everyone
Finding out what is difficult & what is easy with Drupal is one of the hardest obstacles that Drupal adopters confront, whether they are new site owners or inexperienced developers. The majority of their queries center on how user-friendly Drupal is as a platform. Let’s examine a few of the straightforward (but crucial) capabilities that Drupal CMS offers website owners.
- Installation
- Maintenance and Upgrades
- Community Strength and Contribution
- Usability
- Scalability
- Web 2.0 Features
- Security
- User Roles and Workflow
Installation
You will require more “technical knowledge” than simply the ability to connect through FTP and install databases to install Drupal. It will just take you a few minutes to finish the setup once you have all of the prerequisites for Drupal 8 installed. In Drupal 9.1.0, the installer performance has been increased by 20%, resulting in a quicker and simpler installation process. Will you believe me if I state that installing Drupal CMS will take less than “One and a half minutes” for a novice user who is experienced with installing other systems?
Maintenance and Upgrades
Enhancing the upgrade experience was one of Drupal 9.0.0’s primary goals. So it has been. It’s just as simple to upgrade to a major version as it is to upgrade to a minor version. This was amply demonstrated during the upgrade from Drupal 8.9 to Drupal 9.
Drupal CMS makes sure that site managers can easily handle upgrades and maintenance. Creating a website backup first, and then replacing the files with a web update interface are the steps involved in updating your website.
The website administrator simply needs to download one file that contains all of the website’s assets to back up the entire website.
Drupal also alerts the website administrator each time an upgrade is necessary, ensuring that the website never misses a chance to keep current. Drupal CMS also offers security updates for earlier versions if the administrator decides against changing the version. For instance, the community still offers support for Drupal 7 even though Drupal 9 was published in June 2020.
Community Strength and Contribution
Come for the Software, Stay for the Community, Drupal’s unofficial tagline, says it is all about the power of the community. The Drupal Community, which has been operating successfully since 2001, is renowned for its committed group of developers and contributors who utilize, construct, instruct, record, and promote the best practices in Drupal. On Drupal.org, you may find their incredible efforts.
Usability
By selecting edit, administrators of Drupal CMS can view any page or a specific area of a page in guest mode. Although a WYSIWYG editor is not part of the core, you may still purchase it as a module to replace all the other editor integration modules. By delivering a streamlined editing and administration experience for editors and administrators, Drupal CMS enables simple alteration of pages or sections of pages.
Scalability
excellent traffic handling capacity and excellent scalability characterize Drupal CMS. Its web pages can be explicitly cached for a particular period or stored permanently as the default option. Additionally, functionality area blocks can be cached, giving your website superior traffic management capabilities.
Drupal manages all of it with the utmost ease, whether it’s the huge traffic surges on specific occasions or the ongoing web traffic. Did you know that Drupal was used to power the Australian Open 2019’s online experience? There is no space for error when the entire world is watching an event, as Dries once stated.
Web 2.0 Features
In this particular area, Drupal CMS performs better than any other solution and is a great community platform supplier. The platform enables a website administrator to define the conditions under which visitors may comment on any website content.
Drupal also enables administrators to control who can edit, add, or remove certain content kinds by allowing them to specify permissions. Anything handled by the administrator, including articles, images, videos, and other media assets, can be included.
Security
These days, security is a top concern for web domains, and Drupal goes above and beyond to protect your website from any potential security breaches. Every time a new security update is deployed, a notice is sent to users and published on drupal.org. Because of Drupal’s active community, any security flaws are swiftly fixed. Additionally, they offer references to help the user make a website more secure.
When compared to other open-source CMSes on the market today, Drupal easily outperforms them in terms of security. Check out the figures that compare how many sites were compromised by these well-known CMSs in 2016. According to this study, Drupal only makes up 2% of the websites that have been compromised.
User Roles and Workflow
The capacity of Drupal CMS to establish as many user roles as necessary and provide various permissions is its biggest strength. Authenticated user and anonymous user are the two default sets of roles in Drupal’s core, but you can also build additional user roles based on the different content kinds. The taxonomy function can also be used to provide each user-specific access based on the content part.
How Does Drupal Make Things Easy?
- Advanced URL Control: Drupal offers fine-grained control over a page’s URL structure. Each piece of content, known as a node in Drupal, can have a unique URL. The path auto module can also automatically create unique URL structures for each type of content.
- Custom Content Types and Views: Drupal enables you to create new content types without writing a single line of code by utilizing Views and the Content Construction Kit (CCK)! Yes, a wide variety of custom content kinds can be produced and presented in several ways without using any code! You can produce a variety of content kinds, including forum posts, guides, blog posts, news articles, classified advertisements, podcasts, videos, and more.
- Themeing and PHP Template: Does theming require PHP knowledge? No longer, please! Drupal themes may be created with zero PHP expertise. By default, Drupal CMS employs the PHP template theme engine.
- Drupal’s hook system makes it simple to integrate new modules. This hook system is activated whenever a specific Drupal activity is carried out. Using this method, certain functions defined in modules can be called at precise locations by Drupal core, improving core functionality. They enable a module to do a variety of things, such as construct new site URLs and pages (hook_menu), add content to pages (hook_block, hook_footer, etc.), create unique database tables (hook_schema), and more.
Conclusion
Now, in the end, we hope that through this post you were able to know how easy it is to use Drupal. Moreover, if you are looking for a Drupal development company, then you should check out Appic Softwares.
We have an experienced team of Drupal developers that can manage any type of your project. So, what are you waiting for?