What Makes Drupal Stand Out From The Crowd
The birth of content management systems has made the effort of creating, publishing and maintaining a website a task that anyone can manage, regardless of their level of internet based skill and knowledge. This has allowed more and more regular people the opportunity to build a presence for themselves online and better market their small, medium and large business in one of the best ways possible.
Although content management systems are ideal for use when building a website, there comes the difficult decision of choosing what application to actually use. There are hundreds of free and commercial content management system applications available for, most having a similar feature set while adding their own unique twists on how content and media is published. If you’re currently in the position of having to try and make a decision on what CMS best suits you then this article should give you a great indication of why Drupal is a perfect choice with exceptional capability of powering your website.
What Makes Drupal Stand Out From The Crowd
Drupal is by far one of the most popular content management systems, currently being used to power millions of website across the web including small and large corporations and even government initiated projects. That in itself is a good indication that Drupal must have it’s benefits as a CMS of choice, but the following is also just some of the amazing features that allow it to stand out amongst the herd of other content management systems available.
Multilingual
Drupal is multilingual with support for more than 100 languages, making it one of the most portable of all content management systems when it comes to providing support for all users worldwide. The translation packs available for Drupal are provided and maintained by the Drupal user base, being an open source application, meaning that you also have the ability to contribute with your own translations or possible edits to existing translations.
Open Source
Drupal is an open source application that is 100% free to download and use. Being open source means that it is not entirely developed and maintained by a single company, instead it is constantly improved and supported by thousands of people around the world. The open source license also means that you have the freedom to modify the core framework of Drupal to better serve the needs of your website.
User Friendly Interface
The Drupal CMS is designed to be an easy means for website owners to publish and edit their websites, in order to do this a user friendly interface has been developed that saves website owners the need to have to have a good knowledge of web programming languages such as HTML. Instead, the creation of content can easily be completed via a “What you see, is what you get” visual editor. The administration dashboard of Drupal is also super easy to navigate and use, particularly for those who have limited content management system experience.
Download and Extend
When using Drupal you are not locked in to having to use the same core features instead, an intuitive module system has been built into the core software that makes it easy to plug in external script to further improve functionality and provide you with brand new features to benefit your website. As of 2015 there are more than thirty thousand extensions available in the Drupal modules directory, created, provided and supported by thousand of developers across the world. Not many other content management systems can boast about having such a large database of external applications for their core application.
Make It Look Amazing
Drupal offers a templating engine that makes it easy to customise the look of your website, either through create a theme of your own or downloading one of the many free or paid themes available around the web. Although the creation of a unique theme of your own does require a bit of HTML, CSS and PHP knowledge, along with a decent idea of how the application works, it’s really not a large hurdle to jump. If you are not comfortable doing this, then making use of one of the thousands of Drupal themes available from designers all around the web is a great option as well.
Community Support
The Drupal community is made up of designers, developers and website owners who absolutely love the application that powers their website. They are a close and helpful community which means obtaining support for your Drupal related problems as almost no problem at all. Support can be found at the official Drupal community forums or on some of the many fan based Drupal blogs, forums and social media websites all over the world. Don’t think that your issues or questions relating to Drupal are silly, everyone has to start somewhere and you’ll find that there will be a multitude of people more than willing to help you out and answer your questions. On top of this, because Drupal is such a popular content management system, commercial based support and consultation can be found from one of the many specialist Drupal design and development companies.
Start Your Website With Drupal
If you are now convinced that Drupal is definitely the best content management system option for your website, then it’s time to get started with it. The installation of Drupal can be completed in 2 ways, the first is via an automatic installer that can be found in the control panel of most web hosting providers, while your second option would be to manually download the application from the official Drupal website and upload and install it manually on to your web server. In most cases, the easiest and most accessible option for most people is to make use of the auto application installers to save you the headache of having to play around and edit any of the technical elements relating to the install of Drupal, as these installers handle all of the hard work for you.
