Top 7 Reasons to Drupal
Posted on Wednesday, Feb 11, 2009 in "CMS"
When it comes to open-source content management systems, they just don’t get any better than Drupal. This award-winning CMS has been responsible for creating a number of sites including those powered by The Discovery Channel, The New York Observer and Yahoo. If you’re considering open-source solutions, this article will give you seven reasons why Drupal makes the best choice.
1. Search Engine Friendly – Drupal offers enhanced control over URL structure, making this CMS search engine friendly right out of the box. Each piece of content can become customized with clean URLs that better your chances of ranking well in the search engines.
2. Custom Content - The CCK (Content Construction Kit) in Drupal allows you to easily create various types of content. Common examples include news stories, blog posts and tutorials. With the Views Modules feature, you can display these content types in numerous ways. While the average CMS requires complex coding to enable these tasks, Drupal makes it all simple as no programming experience is required.
3. Revision Control – Drupal allows you to save new versions of your web pages every time they are edited. This gives you the ability to revert back to your old versions at any time.
4. Advanced Categorization – Drupal’s taxonomy system lets you organize and tag content with ease. Known as vocabularies, each set of categories can be organized as certain types of content. For instance, you could have blog content that permits free tagging while other sections can be limited to different list of categories. When combined with the CCK and View Modules feature, this functionality makes it easy to target keywords you want to implement into your site.
5. User Management - The Drupal CMS was designed to support community-based sites, proven by the enhanced user and access control functionality it offers. There are no limits to the user roles and access levels you can create and customize. The best thing about Drupal is that it lets you keep advanced management features disabled and then enable them when your site grows and requires more community features.
6. PHP-based – By default, Drupal uses a PHP template theme engine, allowing you to instantly enhance the presentation of your site. Applying themes in Drupal is easier than the WordPress environment and as long as the they are completely scripted, you don’t have to know anything about PHP to install them.
7. Excellent Community Support – Of all open-source content management systems, Drupal has one of the largest and most active communities. You will understand how well supported the CMS is when taking a look at the long scroll of modules that have been contributed to the project. There are many ways to get support including Drupal forums along with a number of video tutorials, podcasts and online documentation. Drupal’s popularity gives you the assurance that this CMS will be around for a long time.
Joomla is highly functional yet lacks out of the box search engine friendliness. WordPress is easy to use but can’t handle larger websites. Where these systems and other platforms fail, Drupal picks up the slack with instant functionality able to satisfy a wide range of needs.
