What’s Drupal?
Why Drupal?
Drupal is designed to help users mange and deliver web content across numerous channels and devices with little to no previous experience designing or programming a web site. It is currently used in a wide variety of sites ranging from small personal blogs to large scale eCommerce sites.
Pros:
The basic unaltered version is a CMS system marketed as free, open source and ran by volunteers. The software installs on servers with only one click after downloading the provided files from their site. Drupal is also advertised for developers in addition to beginners due to the fact the its sites and settings can be fully customized with previous coding experience. The user base is slowly growing by the day which means an increase in Drupal libraries, features and developer support. There are currently around 40,000 Drupal modules currently available to help find that special feature your site needs.
Cons:
Although Drupal is fourth in the CMS market share, it only holds 2.9% of that market compared to the giant WordPress at 62.4%. This does hurt Drupal as education and resources in general are not widely available as the larger systems, not to say there is no Drupal information at all. The main software is free but costs can begin to add up for premium items such as themes and paid modules for your site.
Thoughts:
It is interesting to look into another content management system as my previous knowledge only extends to WordPress. I personally have not used Drupal yet but I plan to dig deeper into it in the future for a comparison. I really enjoy working with WordPress and building custom themes/plugins so the thought of full site customization with Drupal caught my attention. I am curious to see how its ease of use compares to WordPress. It was also interesting to note that the NASA website is currently using Drupal.
Tech Thoughts | Carlos Robles 