What Makes Drupal Your Preferred Choice?

Drupal, an open source Content Management System (CMS), would certainly appeal to a DoIt-Yourself (DIY) enthusiast. It enables users to get a website up and running within minutes and needs no technical knowledge. DIY notwithstanding, Drupal is also used

The origin of the Internet can be traced to the early 1990s. During this period, websites were predominantly textbased. In the mid-1990s, pages included columns and frames that made it possible for a site to have a navigation bar. The use of background images was possible and considered a very advanced design principle. The mid-1990s also saw the use of page ‘Hit counters’ and marquee text. Online page builders like Geocities that allowed people to put up their own sites were very popular during this period. Though Macromedia introduced Flash, it hadn't gained widespread acceptance amongst people. It was only in the late 1990s that Flash began to grow in popularity and designers started inserting Flash elements into pages to add some punch to their sites. It was during this period that Rasmus Lerd of released PHP. Incidentally, in April 1999, he spoke at the Bang Linux event in Bengaluru.

The early 2000s saw the rise of CSS and JavaScript. These technologies made it possible for designers and developers to separate the design elements from the content. They also allowed designers to animate the pages by, for example, adding a drop down menu. HTML forms began to make their appearance. This is what ‘The Hindu’ website (http://http:// www.hindu.com/thehindu/2000/01/01/) looked like during that time. The mid-2000s saw the ‘semantic Web’ movement, during which there were attempts to make machines understand human requests before satisfying them. The late 2000s saw the emergence of Web 2.0 with extensive usage of AJAX for content transition, an increase in page payloads due to increased usage of High Definition images, and the emergence of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. This period also saw the emergence of mobile devices and tablets with different screen sizes and resolutions, and it became necessary to design the page for multiple devices. So pages became lengthier rather than wider and design elements became flatter. The convergence of these technologies required a framework that could manage different types of content and deliver them to different devices, often with different screen sizes and resolutions.

What is a CMS and why you should choose Drupal

A CMS is an application that allows the creation, editing and publishing of content from a single interface so that it can be viewed by people with different devices. Content can be digital assets like text pages, images, audio/video clips, comments, forum posts, etc. There are several CMSs that allow you to create and publish content on the Web, and of them, Drupal is one of the world's most popular.

Drupal provides several out-of-the-box functionalities for Web developers and designers. Using these features, you can assemble a site in a few minutes. Designers will love the separation of the presentation layer from the content. Drupal achieves this using a template mechanism that allows designers to dictate how the content should be rendered in browsers. Drupal's support for external libraries allows designers to create responsive websites. On the deployment front, Drupal has the ability to scale up to handle several thousands of users.

For content writers, Drupal provides several tools that allow authoring and publication of content. These are not amateur tools but are powerful enough to support contentrich sites like those of newspapers. It also has robust user management features, revision control, a rich taxonomy and several other features that are a content writer’s dream.

Though Drupal offers several out-of-the-box functionalities, there may be instances where a Web developer feels that it falls

short. In such cases, extending Drupal is easy and all one has to do is to roll out one’s own module.

Security

Drupal is as secure and sometimes more secure than any other competitive commercial offering. It is built on a set of APIs that mitigate common security risks. Drupal addresses the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project- https:// www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page) top 10 security risks: SQL injection hacks Cross-site scripting Broken authentication and session management Insecure direct object reference Cross-site request forgery Security misconfiguration Failure to restrict URL access Non-validated redirects and forwards Insecure cryptographic storage Insufficient transport layer protection These are very compelling reasons to ensure that your next site is built on Drupal. It is for these very reasons that the White House ( http://www.whitehouse.gov/), The Economist magazine ( http://www.economist.com/) and several others have chosen Drupal.

(To determine the stack that a site runs on you can visit the site and view the technology profile using the ‘built with’ add-on for Firefox.)

Drupal's flexible architecture

Drupal provides Web developers several pre-built components to get started and a set of tools to build a comprehensive content management solution. In short, Drupal provides a set of building blocks to a Web developer to rapidly assemble a site solution.

In Drupal, ‘nodes’ hold all the information pertaining to the content like the title, body, author, published date, etc. The menu system and the taxonomy provide the information architecture. The presentation and display is handled by the theme layer.

This makes it possible for the Web development team to simultaneously make changes to several functions of the site without affecting the other development teams’ ability to propagate their changes.

Ease of administration

Every visitor who lands on your site is considered a ‘user’ by Drupal. To differentiate between different types of users and determine their entitlements on the site, all those who have a user ID in Drupal are non-anonymous users and those who don't are called anonymous users. You can create various classes of users by defining roles and assigning users to them. You can then assign permissions to these roles so that users who are assigned those roles inherit those permissions.

Adding content to a site is as easy as sending out an email. Provide a title and body of the content and click ‘Save’ and your content is published. When you create content, you can choose to include an image, ask Drupal to automatically create a menu link, provide a URL path where the page is accessible, decide to accept comments from visitors, etc. You can also decide to publish the page or save it as a draft to revisit it at a later date.

However, don't let this ease mislead you into thinking that Drupal doesn't provide enough for the power user. You can build your site’s functionality by enabling contributed modules. There are modules available for almost every aspect of a site’s functionality, like: Actions, workflows and triggers CRM systems Advertising and commerce Events Search engine optimisation …and many more. If you at any time feel that these modules fall short of providing you the features you require, you can roll out your own module.

Not really impressed? Well, then you can create a new Drupal distribution if you wish. A Drupal distribution includes the Drupal core along with the themes, modules, libraries and an installation profile. At the time of writing this, there were no other CMSs that allowed you to do this.

Developing for mobile devices

Drupal provides a layer of abstraction between native mobile apps (residing on the device) and the Drupal CMS. Mobile apps can talk to Drupal using the ‘services’ module to fetch content, validate users, execute business logic, etc. If you instead wish to develop a Web app that resides on your Web server, you can integrate it with the Drupal theme layers. You can use any of the available libraries like JQTouch, Enyo JS, Sencha Touch, jQTouch, Jo, jqMobi, etc.

If you are planning on building a site for a specific device, there are modules to detect your visitors’ device and redirect them to the respective URLs.

Several organisations across industry segments have built their sites on Drupal. Case studies can be found on the Drupal. org website at https://drupal.org/case-studies .These sites cover everything from the arts to travel and hospitality. These case studies describe the challenges and provide solutions on how to tackle the complexities of building a complex website.

Considering that Drupal provides several of the building blocks required to assemble a site, the depth of the knowledge available and the large user community, it is worthwhile considering the Drupal platform for your next corporate site or Web solution.