Introduction to Drupal Web Development
If you are looking for a good content management system (CMS) for your website, chances are you must have heard of Drupal, one of the more technically advanced CMS options out here. Drupal offers several business benefits, with its latest version carrying on its open-source roots and core functionality and several upgrades and additions that can modernize your digital business.
Drupal is an open-source CMS that powers millions of applications and websites. In fact, it has no proprietary code and is fully flexible and extensible. Not only active developer community can back it, but also there is a big market for themes, distributions, and modules.
Overall, Drupal pretty much meets all the four market imperatives prescribed by Forrester for digital businesses.
Details of the imperative are mentioned briefly below:
Using Big Data to generate insights: Big data is essential, but only as much as how well you use it. Find ways to interpret data in order to push your business forward. It provides a good foundation to enable organizations to deliver better data-driven mobile, web, and social experiences.
Embrace the shift to mobile: There is no turning back on the shift to mobile, and it is absolutely essential that businesses deliver rich mobile experiences at the right time and the right way, especially in terms of customer loyalty. It supports mobile-first initiatives, apps, and responsive experiences on various screens.
Transforming customer experience: Transformation is essentially the process of adapting specific experiences so that customers get the most out of them whenever, wherever, and however, they want to. Web development with Drupal helps achieve this ability to quickly, efficiently, and effectively make changes to engage and create effective customer experiences.
Accelerating your digital business: In a world that is changing faster than ever, it is crucial that your business stays agile and ready to change quickly. New sites, services, offerings, and applications come up faster than ever before, and you need to be able to keep ahead of consumer demands and needs. Given these requirements, it can serve as an innovation engine and more than just a static tool for building a website. It recognizes that digital is not just marketing. It is also business and helps accelerate your path to digitizing your business.
Now that you know a little about the essentials of Drupal, here is a list of the top ten benefits you can derive from choosing this web development solution. Drupal has historically been a strong choice for creating a digital experience, and its latest generation can really help you think ahead when developing next-generation digital strategies.
Drupal Web Development in Digital Strategies
The following are the different strategies:
1. Innovation and speed
Innovation is essential in this highly competitive world and will make or break the latest generation of leaders. In most industries, you would be challenged from day to day with new market entrants, competitive models, and customer demands to be more helpful, engaged, faster, and better. Thus, you must deliver to survive, and Drupal supports innovation for generating great experiences.
Speed goes hand in hand with innovation and helps generate more possibilities and opportunities. Choosing Drupal means not boxing yourself into your past ideas, but you can explore where you want the website to go next and what you want to achieve. You are not restricted to the parameters of previously conventional software solutions. Drupal’s open-source nature means it is always prepared for new digital experiences. You can quickly adapt to these experiences, execute at scale, and prevent delays in getting your new ideas to the market.
2. Scalability and freedom
Drupal is extremely scalable and able to match the scale of an organization no matter where it currently is on its growth path. It scales up as you grow and as your focus and goals grow. It is used by several organizations of all shapes and sizes, supporting them as they grow, innovate, and push forward.
Web development with it also offers a level of freedom that you cannot find on commercial-based alternatives. Commercial systems usually have a specific way of working and a path you must follow. There are limits and restrictions in place. But these limits are absent with Drupal because of its open-source nature. You can build exactly the kind of digital experience you want without parameters or restrictions. It enables self-paced progress on web development projects and encourages new collaborations and ideas. It does not lock you into a single system or process, giving you the freedom to pursue your own way of web development.
The CMS is massively scalable, starting from five pages and stretching out to 5,000 without needing to change anything. You can easily manage security and performance parameters from the admin console. Being open source gives you freedom from licenses for selling any development work you complete on the platform. You also do not have to pay any royalty. Everyone can access the source code of programs and applications designed on Drupal.
3. Community and authoring of Drupal
One of its biggest advantages of it is its extensive community. Over 3,000 people contributed to the latest Drupal 8 via testing, code contributions, and more. The community helps several thousand Drupal web developers build their experience via CMS projects and support, update, enhance and troubleshoot the platform.
The authoring experience on it is quick and easy. It features a WYSIWYG editor to make it easier for you to understand what the output of your code is, and it also offers in-context and in-line editing on the page, which is a major benefit for those who just want to edit and manage their website content. It is fully responsive right from the start, and you can use the platform for consistently good web experiences on a desktop browser, phone, tablet, or any other device.
The vast community of theme designers offers templates rich in features to help you develop the website. It also offers fonts, aesthetics, stock graphics, color schemes, and more, and layout editors make it much easier to work with these third-party elements easily.
4. Content Delivery, translation, and localization
A key tenet of it is flexible content delivery. As a CMS, it enables you to create and put out content as a service to any device, application, or channel. This also goes for the intake of content into Drupal from other sources. With this emerging API economy, it is one web development tool that will help you capitalize on it.
It also makes translation and localization easier since the platform is built to support any authoring-side language. The interface can be customized to several languages and can support your business processes on localization and language translation, like integrating with external translators. Integration is absolutely essential in this growing ecosystem of connected but disparate technologies for marketing and other digital functions. It can be a good foundation for digital experience and web content management.
This is just a brief look at the possible advantages of Drupal’s capabilities. With each new version, the platform matures and gets better. Tighter security, accessibility, improved SEO: all these and more are inbuilt into the platform, and there is more to discover. With the support of the Drupal community, this particular CMS is set to grow as adoption rates rise.
5. Rapid development and strong content creation
At the heart of Drupal is agile and rapid Web 2.0 development. You can make search, blog and page publishing, content management, clean markup code, polls, forums, and user log-in modules, among others, right from the box. Web development times can come down from weeks to days.
There are several thousand free modules that you can find in the community to quickly guide you and help you add specific features to your website. Modules include CRM, performance, social media to SEO, and more. These modules are like building blocks to your complete online CMS.
A core element of it is its powerful content collaboration and creation elements. You can easily publish and develop content, set user controls and permissions, and choose who can view, share and edit the content, and more. You have full control and can connect with major third-party services and APIs for extending the website further. Social network integration is widely supported, and many easy ways exist to interact with external files and media services.
6. Good for businesses
It is a huge value proposition for businesses establishing their websites. For one, it is completely free. Since it is open source, you are locked down by licenses, recurring fees, or proprietary elements. All you need to do is install the CMS files on your server, and you are ready. Secondly, it has cultivated a reputation over the years for its dependability and security, with constant security patches and updates that make it harder for exploits and easier for users.
Also, the updated web publishing, powerful modules, and clean code make it a highly SEO-friendly CMS. You can find several third-party modules to plug into it for expanding your SEO initiatives too. It is a good choice if you plan on developing a payment gateway on your website since adding e-commerce modules and gateways is easier with its open APIs. Complete e-commerce-ready Drupal distributions are already available, with everything you need right out of the box. You can include everything from logistics handling, customer CRM, shopping carts, messaging, and more.
It has already captured quite a market in web development, with thousands of popular and well-made, high-traffic websites using the platform. These include the Oscars, the White House websites, and more.
The platform features modules like publishing workflow, user administration, news aggregation, metadata functionality, and more. These modules can be added as your website grows, and you can also execute calendars, e-commerce, forums, and blog elements later on. The platform also has a huge range of third-party modules to choose from.
7. Easy to use
It is a good choice for web development, even if you do not have technical competence in coding HTML or other languages. Although you need some programming and coding knowledge, you can get through a project on Drupal even with minimal knowledge. If you can access the admin panel, you can make all sorts of transformations on your website through your browser. You can copy and paste content from any text editor without formatting issues. Modules are mostly easy to figure out, and you can manage them with ease once you get familiar with them.
8. SEO and Templates
Its features make it easier for search engine crawling and ranking. It has meta description, title, keyword, and header tags modules. You can develop content and text optimized for search engines and denote a dynamic URL on your website page as static. Additionally, the platform has a huge range of themes, from basic to business-focused themes, with several available completely for free. You can also find paid templates or get a customized ones made.
9. Value and quality
It offers huge value to your website with its wide range of elements, modules, and much more. You can create almost any kind of website with this platform, from a simple static one for your blog to a large social networking site. The platform offers immense multi-usability because it works well with MySQL, PHP, PostgreSQL, and more. It is also compatible with J-Query and LAMP. Drupal’s mature API libraries and wide range of modules make it increasingly popular.
10. Cross-browser usability and support
Finally, it also offers high usability and compatibility with almost all major browsers, including Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox. Every website’s functionality and design translate just as they should across all browsers. Also, its open-source nature means that it always has a large support network, with several designers and theme makers available to solve your doubts and support you right from the installation stage and down to the deployment of the module.
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