Building a powerful website is a dream come true for any webmaster, web developer, or e-entrepreneur. However, for making this a reality you need to use a powerful and robust Content Management System (CMS). Although you have a choice as far as selecting a Content Management System is concerned, but if you are specifically looking for a powerful, flexible and scalable CMS then Drupal comes as one of the most appropriate choice for you.
Today Drupal is powering millions of websites and applications and has earned the status of being one of the most competent CMS in the world. From running personal blogs to building big enterprise applications, Drupal can be used for building any kind of website.
Drupal comes as an open source Content Management System, which can be used to manage, organize and publish your content. You can use Drupal for managing content on informational websites, member sites, social media websites, web applications and intranets. It gives you a platform into which you can plug various modules so as to get a thoroughly customized CMS according to your needs and requirements.
Drupal also provides varied content management features. For example by using Drupal you can store different kinds of content, display content in various ways. It also allows you to retrieve content based on different sets of criteria. Apart from being open source CMS solution, Drupal has been based on PHP and MySQL. It has gotten the status of being one of the earliest CMS to come into existence and was released as early as in the year 2001.
Being an extremely powerful and developer friendly CMS, Drupal has always been the preferred choice for millions of webmasters and e-entrepreneurs. So if you too are planning to build a data-intensive and feature rich website then Drupal can be the right CMS platform for you. Moreover, Drupal is maintained and developed by a community of more than 600,000 users and developers. As Drupal is distributed under General Public License (GPL), it can be freely downloaded and shared with others. Its open source model ensures that it is constantly being developed to incorporate latest technologies from the web so as to ease the overall working.
If you ask me what the most outstanding feature of Drupal is, I would like to say that Drupal is one of the most flexible CMS that you can have for your website. Whether you want to run a simple blog or want to have a powerful backend that can handle millions of users, Drupal has been equipped to manage all these varied differences in the web world. Further up, Drupal comes with excellent SEO capabilities and is thorough developer friendly too.
Moreover, Drupal scores excellent marks as far as Scalability is concerned and remains stable even while handling thousands of users. Drupal comes as an enterprise friendly CMS solution. Empowered with ACL capabilities and powerful version control functionalities, Drupal has been the first choice for thousands of enterprise customers. Drupal comes as a multi-user system. Your website visitors can log in as “authenticated” users. You can assign roles and can create multiple permission levels thereby controlling the access levels of your website users. On the design front, Drupal provides many free and extensively customizable themes. You can rest assured on the security front as Drupal goes through severe security testing, and its core code is thoroughly adapted to prevent security vulnerabilities.
Disadvantages of using Drupal
Although Drupal is one of the most powerful and popular CMS solution, it has some disadvantages too that you should be aware of if you are planning to use Drupal. One of the major disadvantages of using Drupal is the fact that it is a complicated CMS solution. So you need to be persistent enough to endure its steep learning curve. Drupal invariably requires you to have technical capabilities including coding skills. Secondly, most of the good plugins (In Drupal plugins are referred as ‘modules’) in Drupal are not available for free.
Thirdly, there is a lack of good and varied Drupal Themes. So if you are looking for an excellent and unique design for your website you might have to use the services of a good designer.
On the whole, leaving aside its few shortcomings, using Drupal as your open source web development platform you can be sure of running a powerful and world class website. Drupal is a highly flexible and feature rich CMS solution.