Why We Love Drupal

Content management systems (CMS) are like manna from heaven - they allow novice computer users to update a website so that the company's web site designer can get back to doing what she loves: making more sites.

Once bitten by the CMS bug (client's can update their own sites! without having to know code!), we eagerly struck out to find the holy grail: a CMS that would have clean code, be easy for client's to use but also flexible enough for us so that we could design sites the way we wanted to. This proved to be more of a challenge than anticipated.

A Thousand and One Solutions

There are literally thousands of content management systems out there. It seems like every web development firm has their own beautifully branded version. Each blithly promises to make it easy for you, the client, to update your own web site, even if you are as hopeless as my mother is on a computer. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Why Proprietary Solutions Suck

Why shouldn't you use Amazing Web Company's proprietary CMS? Look at how shiny it is! They talk coding geek! They must know what they're doing, right?

We thought so too. So we started out using another company's CMS for our clients' projects. We figured this way we could go on designing great sites without having to create our own version of the wheel.

And we pushed the boundaries, using the CMS to create beautiful websites for our clients. All was hunky-dory. Then suddenly the company lost it's footing and disappeared. No more code updates, no more support. A year of learning how to fully utilize their particular CMS wasted.

We scrambled to hire one of the now-defunct company's coders so we could continue limping along for a while. In the meantime, we thought, hey why not create our own CMS solution? Flash-forward a year. We've churned through several coders only to be left with a feeble impression of a CMS with a very slick design. It was time to move on.

And the Beat Goes On...

We weren't the only one's hating proprietary content management solutions. Client's kept coming to us with horror stories: of sites that had to be designed with a cookie cutter in order to work with a CMS; how they spent $XX thousands of dollars with a now non-existing company to get "an award-winning website" only to have the CMS they really needed not work in the end; and worst of all, of souring relationships that left them with NO RIGHTS to the web site they just paid all that money for.

It was time to throw up our hands and look for something better. And that something was called Open Source (and more specifically, Drupal).

The Case for Open Source

The open source framework means you're not locked into a proprietary system and that anyone can have access to the code and go in there and muck around. This means that hundreds of thousands of coders around the globe are working on the code to make sure it works. Bugs are more quickly found and fixed. As open source software solution RedHat mentions on their web site, open source also means freedom: "when customers don't like how one vendor is serving them, they can choose another without overhauling their infrastructure. No more technology lock-in. No more monopolies."

This means no more worries about a company going out of business right after you designed your site with their CMS. As Martha Stewart would say, it's a good thing.

But, we're still talking about the world of content management systems, and there are many, many open source CMS's out there. Maybe it's an ego thing, who knows? We started checking them all out again, this time painfully aware of Caveat Emptor.

Our Criteria

We knew we wanted an open source CMS that would be actively supported, flexible, and robust. It needed to be able to support our SEO work, and also there had to be enough people working on it so that we knew it wouldn't be obsolete in the next year.

There are plenty of articles comparing CMS's, so I'm not going to get into it here. Suffice to say that after carefully reviewing the top systems out there, we chose Drupal for its combination of flexibility, scalability, community and maturity. Most importantly, though, almost any competent web developer can work with the Drupal CMS - something that was important for us as well as we looked to the future for hiring additional people.

Why Drupal?

But don't take our word for it. Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems on the Internet and is much more robust than it's competitors like Mambo/Joomla. According to estimates, there are an excess of 50,000 sites using Drupal. These include Amnesty International, MTV UK, Sony's MusicBox, The Onion, Spread Firefox, and several political sites such as Vote Hillary and Draft Obama. IBM, NASA and Yahoo all use Drupal for their intranets (see "Why Yahoo! chose Drupal for an internal site"). NATO and the World Bank also use Drupal.

Drupal is a completely open source platform built on PHP/MySQL and has a clean, focused core code base. It's really an application framework, which makes it easy to add modules for features without touching the core PHP code, leaving the site safe for quick updates when needed.

Unlike many other CMSs, Drupal writes its code compliant with XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) instead of using HTML tables to theme pages. It also supports a broad range of SEO techniques, making it easy for us to optimize sites for search engines. In addition, it works well in a shared hosting environment (the least expensive, most common web hosting packages).

Most importantly, Drupal has a large, friendly, worldwide community of developers who work on it, write modules to make it able to do more, and are there for support. The community is robust, VERY active and lead by some really smart people, which means that there are many sources for Drupal-related services if the need arises in the future.

We Love Drupal!

So there, I've said it: we love Drupal. We've been working with it through many code revs, and it's been a dream. Yes, Drupal is not for the faint-of-heart "web developer" newbie – it looks rather plain out of the box, so you'll need to actually find a designer or firm that knows how to code to make it amount to anything. But that's what makes it so great for us (and many other firms like us): we can design to our hearts content, safe in knowing that Drupal will allow us to build almost anything we can imagine. All it takes is some CSS, a little PHP and some theming knowledge and you're off.

Best of all is that great community of programmers from around the world that help to make Drupal better every day. Module developers rock our world, churning out new functionality all the time. Dries and his team work on making it easier to assemble and maintain websites with Drupal. So it's not just the coders that make us raving Drupal fans. It's that Drupaler's are a fun bunch of people, a mix of hard-core geeks, design divas and marketing mavens all looking to make the web a better place.