Website Design: Drupal website development

Drupal - the CMS for large firms and expansion possibilities

Drupal is a very popular and established content management system that is suitable for large websites with multiple administrators. Drupal has been used in tens of thousands of installations and is thus one of the largest content management systems (CMS) in the world. It has won many awards over the years.

Factors in favour of Drupal are:

  • Price (free, no licensing costs)
  • Popularity (large developer and user community)
  • Scalability
  • Integration Opportunities
  • Editor possibilities of language and roles

The goal for Drupal is that with the help of set standards and open source it should be possible to build a system where individuals and groups who are geographically dispersed can collectively produce, discuss and share information. With a focus on community and collaboration with the Drupal module thinking, Drupal becomes an effective platform for both website and intranet.

Drupal is therefore modular in design. This means that if for example you need to do mailings or newsletters or have a 'community' then there are often finished modules to utilise. Since Drupal has many users there are constantly new modules produced and there is a good chance that there is something suitable for your needs.

Features

  • Content Management - The foundation of all CMS, the ability to easily update and add text, images, documents, video, etc.
  • Templates - Drupal separates the content from the presentation. This way you can control your site's appearance. The templates are created using standard HTML and PHP
  • Comments - Drupal includes functionality for threaded comments, news groups or forums
  • Version Control - Each page can be saved in earlier versions of history of who changed what
  • Searching - All content is indexed and searchable using the built-in search module
  • Simple paths - with the apache server's mod_rewrite module, all the url can be easily read and understood
  • Research - Built opportunity to create online surveys
  • Blogging - With Drupal API support, the website can be updated with a variety of blog tools
  • Syndication of content - Content can be delivered as RSS feeds. With Drupal you can also publish news feeds from other sites.
  • Permalinks - feature links to always be relevant, even if you alter the structure of your site or moving pages
  • Role-based management of administrators - the ability to create groups and roles with different rights
  • User Management - Users can register and then log in to access protected content. You can also use an external function as Jabber or Blogger to sync your login. For intranet Drupal can be integrated with an LDAP server
  • Personalisation - The content and appearance can be adapted to who's looking at the page
  • Statistics - Within Drupal you can view statistics about the most visited pages, sites that your visitors come from, how visitors click around your site and much more
  • Discussion - Drupal is able to have with full-scale discussion
  • Caching - Drupal has caching support that makes the site quick to load even if it contains many pages
  • Multi-Language Support - Drupal is designed to make it possible to manage multilingual websites. A graphical translation-interface is available if you want to create your own translations of the pages or the administrative interface. Supported languages include Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dzongkha, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Latvian, Lithuanian, Marathi (Indian), Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian, Romanian, Russian, British Scotland, Slovakian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese

Read more about the features of Drupal.

Modules

Modules are plug-ins that extend the functionality of Drupal. These are mostly in English but in several cases in other languages. There are over 4500 modules for Drupal and some of the most popular modules are:

  • Contact Form
  • Calendar
  • Guestbook
  • E-shop
  • Banner System
  • VBulletin forum
  • Gallery
  • Newsletter Mailings
  • Graphical editing of web pages
  • Printer friendly pages

Modules like Views and CCK can be used to customise your Drupal site to to your needs. Read more about the modules.

Technology

Drupal is written in the programming language PHP and released as free open source software. It is distributed under a GNU General Public License which means that you have access to source code and also have the right to modify and improve the code. Drupal uses a database to store the information. MySQL is mostly used but even PostgreSQL work. Drupal works with web servers running either Apache or Microsoft IIS.