Why Drupal?
Drupal is a free and open-source content-management framework that can be tailored and customized to simple websites or complex web applications. Drupal grows as you grow with thousands of free modules and themes that will help you attract the web audience you need to deliver your message, grow brand awareness, and build your community.
Drupal is accessible and multilingual
The latest release of Drupal is the most powerful and accessible version of Drupal to date. With accessibility and multilingual capabilities built into Drupal, you can be assured that you’ll have the capability to reach the audience that you are targeting to convey your message.
Drupal is flexible by design
From desktop applications such as Aquia Dev Desktop that allows you to build your web application on your own computer, or hosting from a Drupal hosting provider, you can be sure that your Drupal website and/or application will run on the platform that meets your needs. Drupal is easy to move and scale. Drupal conforms to your needs.
The software you need to get is free.
Installing and running Drupal is completely free. This includes the 40,000+ modules available to extend site functionality and the 2500+ themes used for modifying site appearance.
If you are running the site locally, you may also need to install a “stack” – the behind-the-scenes software that serves your website.
The underlying ‘stack’
A Drupal site needs a small ‘stack’ of software that works in the background to serve your site and store your content:
- ‘Server’ software
- ‘Database’ software
- ‘PHP‘ interpreting software (Drupal is based on the programming language ‘php’.)
This Stack is already installed on most, if not all commercial webhosts. For local development, this Stack is available in many forms.
Flexibility, meet Simplicity
Solutions for content management struggle to balance flexibility and simplicity. If a solution is simple, it can only be used for a single purpose and if it is flexible, it may be too difficult for newcomers to learn.
The average content management system (CMS) is like a toy truck. Specific assumptions have been made about how it will be used and these assumptions are difficult to override. Content management frameworks, on the other hand, are like the raw materials needed to make any toy—no assumptions have been made about how they’ll be used and the builder needs expert technical knowledge in order to make anything at all.
Drupal is designed to be the perfect content management solution provider for non-technical users who need both simplicity and flexibility. It accomplishes this through its modular approach of site-building. Unlike other CMSs, Drupal isn’t a prefabricated toy truck, but rather a collection of wheels, windshields, axles, frames, etc., that a toy-maker can easily connect together. With Drupal, a maker could create a toy truck and similarly can also create a toy such as an airplane, submarine, or robot. For this reason, Drupal may be described as both a content management system and a content management framework—one unified system that strives to have the strengths of both, without their deficiencies.
So, whether a site builder is looking to create a news site, online store, social network, blog, wiki, or anything else, it’s just a matter of combining the right modules. The only limitations are the creator’s imagination.