The Basics of Drupal

Content Management System (CMS)

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS) for businesses and blogs. The software utilizes an open source-based framework to display content to users. Displaying content is a website’s most basic function.

Drupal provides many of our customers with a free alternative to WordPress, while maintaining a multitude of services that can allow your site to become a custom solution for the fraction of the cost. A view-based system makes it easy to develop many products.

Views and Custom Fields!

Built within Drupal is a wonderful system designed to allow every user to develop and deploy custom fields. These fields can be used to build anything from company directories, to image galleries, that users or admins can enter. Drupal then provides a fancy tool for showing the views of the pages.

Cons

There are issues with Drupal, however. The competing products may provide benefits that decrease cost, and increase value. We’ve also found it harder to find support from professionals and the documentation, despite our personal contributions, still leaves much to desire. But this doesn’t invalidate Drupal, just make it picky for which projects it supports.

Pros

Drupal is a powerful CMS that went to build a more complete solution to building websites that did not require coding. They did this through a verity of built-in plugins that allow the site admin to define custom content types. Displays, or views, can then also be built for easily displaying the data.

Support (Advertisement)

Though, Proper Programming can develop and deploy all Drupal-based projects. We also support all existing Drupal-based systems and look forward to providing our clients with an extended life to existing systems. When appropriate, we also work to migrate clients off Drupal. And of course, we will create new Drupal projects when appropriate.

Alternatives

The largest alternative to Drupal is WordPress. It provides similar tools to Drupal, but requires more plugins that are not built within Drupal. WordPress is a blog-based CMS that can be extended to provide just about any web function a business could own.

Another alternative to Drupal is Laravel, or a Framework built on one of the popular languages (like PHP). These can offer complete custom projects a better, more clean code base that is easier to support and easier to develop.

More custom development, and large system development, can often benefit from Laravel’s approach. While the WordPress solutions tend to benefit the majority of small businesses, who might want just good enough. Drupal shines in the middle, and does middle range budget and custom business infrastructure system development exceptionally well.

Learn More

We have an entire Drupal section of learning martial that we are writing.