Drupal: What It Is and Why We Love It!

Posted 30 weeks ago (October 18, 2011 at 10:00 AM) in Design

How do we love Drupal? Let us count the ways! As our clients ask for and need more from their CMS solutions, we find that more often than not Drupal is the best choice for creating the beautifully robust and responsive websites our clients long for. With our expertise, we can improve upon Drupal’s base offerings and custom-build our clients’ dreams.

What is Drupal?

Drupal is Rise’s favorite content management system (CMS). There are currently three major players in the CMS world: Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla. While we are experienced with other systems and can offer them if they better fit an individual clients’ needs, we usually recommend Drupal. It’s easy for our clients to use and is backed by an amazing community that creates new features through voluntary collaboration. It is truly driven by passion for the art and science of coding – which makes it perfect for Rise.

Drupal is PHP based and works on the principle of modules. Each module is a chunk of programing that does a job, like a calendar or calculator. Each module plugs in to help your site function beautifully, efficiently, and create the experience you want your visitors to enjoy. At Rise, we do a little bit of everything from customizing modules created by other developers to creating modules from scratch, so you can get the precise features you’re looking for.

We think it’s pretty amazing that huge sites like whitehouse.gov and grammy.com can be built in Drupal, yet it’s so easy to use that our clients can easily update their own content should they so desire!

Here are a few of our favorite websites that we’ve built on Drupal.

Major Benefits of Using Drupal

  • You can update your site too! It’s easy to update even for our clients who aren’t experts but want to have a hand in updating their site. It makes copy changes easy and stress-free.
  • Drupal is free to use! The platform is open source, so you don’t have to pay a monthly rental cost to keep your site up like some CMSs. The only cost is for us to customize it to our clients’ liking by developing the structure and design, doing the programming, and creating the copy. After that, it’s just about ongoing marketing.
  • You never wait long for upgrades. Drupal is widely popular, so updates happen fast and often and we can keep improving your site. This lets you stay on top of the latest developments in the web industry which keeps your website safer and your technology up to date.
  • Best of all, using Drupal allows you to save money because many great modules already exist. We don’t have to make everything from scratch.

At Rise, we use a mix of custom modules and customized existing ones. But don’t think that our sites are cookie-cutter! The site structure, copy and design are always all custom built. With our expertise, we can make Drupal look, feel and work the way you need it to.

Why We Choose Drupal 7

Drupal 7 is the latest iteration of Drupal. General benefits aside, here are some of the kickers for us that keep us choosing Drupal 7 over any other CMS:

  • It’s new and sparkly, and in the case of digital technology, newer is generally better which is definitely true of Drupal 7. It’s the newest and the best out there and we look forward to Drupal 8 someday!
  • Drupal makes responsive web design much easier, which equates to lower costs and faster development so that our clients can have sites that look great no matter the browser size (Mobile, iPad, etc).
  • It’s extremely flexible with over 800 modules available to extend your site at your pace or give you an array of choices for us to implement right away!
  • The Drupal community put a lot of effort into optimizing their JavaScript and CSS as well as improving the caching process so that sites built on Drupal 7 can handle scads of traffic and still be quick and responsive.

If you are interested in exploring the possibilities of creating your website using Drupal or any other platform, we encourage you to give us a call to set up a consultation. We love what we do here at Rise and can’t wait to build something amazing with you!