What is Drupal? A Brief Overview

If you have just started learning about CMS or want to become more adept in this domain, you must know about Drupal. But What is Drupal? Drupal is an open-source Content Management System (CMS) renowned for its robustness and flexibility. Used for building and managing a diverse array of websites and applications, it stands out for its customisable nature and scalability.  

It also enables developers to create complex, content-rich websites and applications tailored to specific needs. Additionally, it offers a vast array of modules and themes, allowing for extensive customisation. With a strong emphasis on security and a supportive community, Drupal is a preferred choice for many organisations. Read this blog to learn more in-depth about What is Drupal, its features, why it is so popular with all sizes of organisations and its advantages and disadvantages.

Table of Contents

1) What is Drupal?

2) Features of Drupal

3) Drupal vs. Acquia

4) Advantages and disadvantages of Drupal 

5) Conclusion

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP. It's used for creating and managing websites of various types, from small personal blogs to large corporate, political, and government sites. Thanks to its modular design, which allows users to add or create custom modules to expand its capabilities, it stands out for its flexibility and extensibility.

Another significant aspect of Drupal is its content management capabilities. It offers a sophisticated taxonomy system, allowing for high content organisation and categorisation levels. Additionally, it is known for its ability to handle complex content relationships and workflows, making it ideal for sites requiring detailed content management.
 

Features of Drupal

Drupal is a robust CMS which offers a wide array of features catering to the various needs of web developers and content managers. Here's an expanded list of its key features:

a) Modular design: Drupal operates on a modular framework, allowing you to customise functionality with various add-ons and modules. This design provides flexibility and scalability for different types of websites. 

b) Extensive API support: It offers a comprehensive range of APIs, including RESTful, JSON:API, and GraphQL, facilitating third-party integrations and development of web services. 

c) Responsive web design: It ensures websites are mobile-friendly and responsive, adapting layouts to different screen sizes for optimal viewing experiences. 

d) Multilingual capabilities: It supports multiple languages, offering tools for easy translation and localisation of websites, essential for global reach. 

e) Advanced user management: It provides detailed user access control, allowing administrators to create roles with specific permissions.

f) Content authoring: With an intuitive interface, including a WYSIWYG editor, you can easily create and manage content.   

g) SEO-friendly: It is designed to be SEO-friendly, with capabilities to manage metadata, URLs, and other elements crucial for search engine optimisation.

h) High performance and scalability: Known for its scalability, Drupal can handle high traffic volumes and content-rich websites efficiently. 

i) Security: Prioritising security, Drupal has a dedicated team that regularly updates and patches the core software, safeguarding against vulnerabilities.

j) Taxonomy system: It provides a sophisticated taxonomy system, allowing for complex categorisation and organisation of content. 

Drupal vs. Acquia

Drupal is an open-source content management system, while Acquia provides products and services specifically for Drupal. Here's a table outlining some of their primary differences:
 

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Advantages and disadvantages of Drupal 

Here, we have discussed some advantages and disadvantages of Drupal to help you understand it better:

Advantages of Drupal 

Let’s look at some of the advantages of Drupal:

a) Flexibility and customisation: Drupal's modular architecture allows for extensive customisation. You can create bespoke content types and views, tailoring the site to specific needs.

b) Robust security: Known for its strong focus on security, Drupal has rigorous coding standards and a proactive security team, making it a preferred choice for government and enterprise websites. 

c) Scalability: It excels in handling large amounts of content and high traffic, making it ideal for large-scale websites and applications. 

d) Community support: It benefits from a large, active community. This global network offers extensive modules, themes, distributions, peer support and knowledge sharing.  

e) Multilingual features: Built-in multilingual support allows for creating language-specific sites, which is crucial for global businesses and organisations.  

f) Mobile-first approach: Responsive design is a core feature, ensuring that Drupal sites are mobile-friendly and accessible across various devices. 

g) SEO-friendly: It provides extensive SEO modules, helping sites achieve better visibility and ranking on search engines.

h) Integrated digital marketing: With modules for CRM integration, analytics, and marketing automation, Drupal aligns well with digital marketing strategies. 

i) Accessibility: Committed to web accessibility standards, Drupal ensures websites are accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. 

j) Content management capabilities: Advanced content management features, like taxonomy, content types, and views, offer powerful ways to organise and display content.

Disadvantages of Drupal

While Drupal is a powerful content management system, it has certain disadvantages that are important to consider: 

a) Complexity: Drupal's advanced features and flexibility can be overwhelming, especially for beginners. Its steep learning curve can be a barrier for users without technical expertise. 

b) Performance: Without proper optimisation, Drupal sites can suffer from performance issues, particularly in shared hosting environments or when handling large volumes of content and traffic.

c) Resource intensive: It can be demanding on server resources. Larger or poorly optimised sites might require more robust hosting solutions, increasing costs. 

d) Development costs: Customising Drupal often requires skilled developers, leading to higher development costs than simpler CMS platforms.  

e) Less extensive theme market: Compared to other CMSs like WordPress, Drupal has fewer themes available, potentially leading to extra effort in design and development for a unique look. 

f) Frequent updates: While beneficial for security and features, its frequent updates can require regular maintenance and can be cumbersome for site administrators.  

g) Limited “out-of-the-box” functionality: It can be less straightforward for creating simple websites due to its focus on flexibility and customisation. 

h) Community size: While Drupal has a strong community, it is smaller than other platforms like WordPress, which can sometimes mean fewer resources and third-party integrations.  

i) Backward compatibility: Major version upgrades (e.g., from Drupal 7 to 8) can be challenging due to backwards compatibility issues, requiring significant migration effort. 

j) User Interface: The administrative interface is not as intuitive as some of its competitors, which can affect the User Experience for site administrators and content editors.

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Conclusion

We hope that you learned What is Drupal from this blog. We also discussed that it is a powerful and flexible open-source Content Management System renowned for its modularity and robust security. Ideal for complex, content-rich websites, it's supported by a strong community, offering extensive customisation options. While it has a steep learning curve, Drupal excels in scalability and performance for diverse web projects.

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