Jay LeonardDrupal is an excellent tool for building and operating a wide range of client facing websites and corporate intranet sites.
It has powerful features built into the core, and comes with a massive array of modules that extend its formidable default functionality.
I recently spent some time in Canada, and was invited to talk to the people at Disney’s Club Penguin about the advantages and uses of Drupal. One of the things that struck me, during the meeting, was how advanced Drupal was in comparison to people’s expectations – I don’t think most companies fully appreciate what Drupal is capable of, and how it can streamline and automate business operations.
Many businesses (I’m speaking generically here, not about Club Penguin) operate on legacy systems that are slow and inefficient, even though they get the job done in the end. Since the job ultimately gets done, company decision makers don’t look for ways to improve.
The attitude,”If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it“, must be costing the global economy trillions of dollars in wasted man hours using inefficient legacy software and business processes.
I thought I would highlight just a few features of Drupal that make it an excellent choice for small, medium and large businesses requiring any type of web platform – internal or client facing:
1. Migration and updating legacy systems
Drupal has an open API that makes it possible to utilize all the excellent programming that has gone into developing the CMS itself for any custom applications.
Amongst the thousands of functions that are available, are those that create, update and manage content. Migrating from any other web platform, or even a text file or excel spreadsheet, or something equally arcane, becomes very easy with a small PHP script.
Something like this:
The highlighted function in the above demo PHP script shows how easy it is to programatically create new Drupal content – a single function call.
An iterative PHP script like the one above makes it very easy to migrate thousands or millions of records to a new Drupal CMS in minutes.
Drupal also has built in features to migrate from other well known CMS platforms, so you won’t even need a script for those platforms.
Bottom line: Don’t be afraid of migration costs. It’s not as bad as you think.
2. Extensible and modular
Almost every business I speak to thinks that the dictates and requirements of their business are unique. In reality, the vast majority of business requirements are, in the abstract, very similar.
Drupal has a large community of business users and many of these businesses have contributed back to the Drupal community by making their developments available for others to use as part of Drupal modules download facility.
The net result is that most of what your business needs to accomplish can be done without having to resort to custom development – someone else has already grappled with the problem and solved it. Find the right module, install it and the functionality you need is available at the click of a button.
Bottom line: Powerful business oriented functionality is available in the form of freely downloadable, well supported community modules. Expensive, custom coding can often be avoided by using Drupal as your web platform.
3. Easily implementable business rules
Businesses tend to grow their processes organically as they grow. There’s no set rulebook for how business operations must be run. One of the questions I most often face is “Will Drupal be able to adapt to us, or will we have to adapt to it“.
I don’t like this question because it smacks of apathy. To me it makes more sense to adapt your own processes, if doing things a different way is more efficient.
That’s my personal opinion, but Drupal doesn’t enforce it. In fact, Drupal tries its best not to enforce any processes on its users. Instead, it comes with a completely customizable, flexible and extensible Rules system that allows any business process to be modeled with little to no programming required.
For example, if your marketing content needs to be created by one person, edited by someone else, sent for approval to someone else, and then published only for a certain audience at a certain time… it’s not a problem to implement.
Bottom line: Drupal can mould itself to your business allowing you to continue working as you always have – for better or worse. Alternatively, it can help you to adapt and evolve to the latest, industry standard best practices.
4. Holistic CMS
If holistic is a term you associate with homeopathy, then here’s a new definition. I consider Drupal to be an holistic CMS because the entire project has an elegant way of doing things, that is implemented from the ground up.
The rules and guidelines laid out by the project itself help businesses to follow in their good example and that encourages good programming practices, good website management practices, good SEO and online marketing practices, good analytics and marketing research practices and so on.
Unlike other open source projects such as osCommerce, which, while it gets the job done as an eCommerce platform, is a horror to behold “under the hood“. Drupal is easy to understand and beautifully coded – making it easy to learn and customize.
Bottom line: Drupal infers an advantage on the businesses that use it because it is easy to work with and customize. In the long run, it is cheaper and more efficient than using less cleanly coded solutions.
5. Widespread and well supported
A lot of big companies, celebrities, governments, non-profits and other organizations use Drupal. It’s a huge project with many thousands of contributors, and more importantly, a very active online community.
This means that your business is not isolated when it comes time to find help. Businesses that opt for custom web development solutions are often locked into service and support contracts with their original developers.
Drupal based businesses can choose any one of the plethora of fantastic development and design companies and thousands of individual developers to work on their site. Because Drupal is a common language, you’re never tied into exorbitant specialist developers.
Bottom line: A thriving and competitive development and design community encourages high quality Drupal services and products at low cost. From a business perspective, using Drupal means that you will be able to grow and adapt easily and efficiently because there will never be a shortage of skills available.
Unsure about Drupal for your business?
If you’re still unsure about whether or not Drupal can meet your needs, feel free to set up a Drupal and business consult. I’d be happy to offer you some advice and work with you to select a web platform and meet your business objectives quickly.
I have written books on a number on web platforms and programming languages, so I have a good overview of what is available, what can be achieved, and what it will take. Accordingly, I can offer you fair and impartial advice on the best way to move forward for your precise business requirements.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Drupal modular feature provides quick website development with lesser coding resulting in website that can be easy to customize and maintain, thanks for sharing Drupal benefits.
Fantastic, gives the heads up prior the Drupal meet up in Edinburgh! Thanks.
I use Drupal CMS for my business because it’s very secure compared to other CMS out there, and if Drupal CMS is coupled managed drupal hosting by Cloudways, it become extra secure, plus the site has almost no downtime which is also very good for my business.