Archive for the ‘Drupal’ Category

If you are considering creation of a website and trying to choose one of the content management systems available for free, Drupal is definitely an option to consider. Having worked with it for about two years and developed several websites (usually within a team, but also once or twice without any help), I can safely recommend it to you if you are looking for a website larger than five pages and/or more complicated than just a blog (for a simple blog WordPress is, without a doubt, the best solution).

What can Drupal do for you?

Drupal gives you a flexible, easy-to-learn and highly configurable site administration interface, with which you can control nearly everything. It supports search engine friendly URLs and never introduces any obstacles for search engine spiders trying to access and index your site (too many CMS’s do). It gives your webmaster (or you, if you are DIY’ing your website) full control over the code. It also supports blocks (small pieces of code you can insert into any area of your template – header, content, footer, right or left column, you name it) – some of those blocks are standard and come with the system, but you can create your own. Very convenient – I’ve used them a lot.

Drupal comes with a set of modules, which you can enable or disable depending on what functionality your website needs, including blog and forum module. Some of them come by default with the standard installation package; there are also a lot of additional modules, which you can download and install onto your system. If you have an experienced Drupal programmer on staff – or are about to hire such a person for the project – you can have bespoke modules developed using Drupal API and adjusted to meet your needs.

If you need an e-commerce website, Drupal has advanced solutions for it too, and a good programmer can enhance it greatly to customise the functionality of your e-shop. I have participated in such a project: the result was amazing.

Using some CSS and very little editing to templates, an experienced web designer can customise the look and feel of your website: there are practically no restrictions to it. For SEO there is yet another module available, which, once installed, enables individual meta tags for every page. And even if you don’t know any HTML, with Drupal you will soon learn how to add new pages with content all by yourself.

What else?

If you would like to have a forum and a blog, you can enable the necessary modules in one click, and then create as many categories and subcategories as you like. There are additional modules available too – e.g. for tag clouds and other blog-related functionality you might need. Drupal’s website hosts a large community where you can find answers you any “how to” questions that may arise in connection with setting up and customising your site. If you need additional functionality, you can post your request to Drupal developers: they are paying attention to their users’ desires and continuously working on new additions: that’s why new versions of the system are released so often. Security holes get found and fixed very quickly too.

I won’t say that Drupal is perfect: no software is. But it’s definitely very good, and the chances are it will satisfy any needs you have in connection with your web presence. In experienced hands Drupal-based websites become feature-rich and professionally looking.

Just make sure you have a professional to do the job – but this is true regardless of your choice of a CMS. Another important thing about Drupal: it’s completely free.