Why Choose Drupal CMS?

What is Drupal and Why you Should Consider it?

Drupal is one of the most trusted content management systems available today. For over 16 years, Bear Group has built custom Drupal websites and web apps. We’ve seen first-hand why this platform is a secure, smart choice for government, enterprise, nonprofits, higher education, and more.

About Drupal

Drupal provides you with the content management system (CMS) framework to build a highly-custom website to meet your unique needs. Drupal is an open-source platform with a strong community of developers. The platform is incredibly flexible and can fit many needs, so we sometimes refer to it as the “Swiss Army Knife” of platforms.

Drupal Benefits to Your Business

These are features that are both unique to Drupal, and directly beneficial to your website management goals:

1. It’s flexible

Drupal is built on a modular system, meaning that Drupal websites are extended with individual modules, similar to building blocks. Features can be enabled and disabled as easily as turning them on and off. It’s simple enough that once these features have been installed, non-technical admin have the ability to manage them. You can dictate where features like blogging capabilities, comments sections, and user accounts appear on your website from a single module directory.

From the same platform, you have the flexibility to create a website as simple as a single direction publishing site, to an interactive community website. With thousands of modules freely available through the Drupal community as well, creating a website with custom functionalities requires a lot less development time. Using pre-written modules instead of creating custom features from scratch, your web developers can build your website much faster.

2. Content management features

Most CMS platforms have similar content management features. You manage your content through familiar fields, WYSIWYG toolbars, and image file upload processes. Where Drupal distinguishes itself is how much freedom it allows non-technical admin to have over otherwise complicated content processes. Here’s just a few:

Views

Views is a Drupal module (included in core in Drupal 8.0) that allows website admin to create their own data structures. Essentially, you can generate content lists based on tags you specify. How your Views is displayed depends on design, a Views list could be anything from a list of recent blog posts in the footer of your website, to a page of images linking to past portfolio projects. With Views you may need a designer, but you can arrange and place incredibly custom blocks of content without coding knowledge.

Content types and fields

Drupal’s system makes creating your own content types much easier–blog posts, portfolio pages, web forms. You don’t have to recreate the page in each instance, saving the page as a content type that can be used again and again. And from the back-end, you can also specify the fields used to display content on the user’s side.

3. Secure

Unfortunately, nothing online can ever be absolutely secure. Drupal has, however, taken strides to create a system as secure as possible.

  1. Drupal is not a proprietary system (like AEM, Sitecore, Weebly, Squarespace). You own your own code and can manage how it’s protected.
  2. Drupal’s core team is dedicated to security, and regularly release security patches and updates their code to address found vulnerabilities.
  3. The Drupal community augments the Drupal core team. Thousands of developers use their free time to contribute to and monitor Drupal’s code.
  4. Just as Drupal’s open-source system allows it to easily integrate with other third-party systems, it can also communicate with additional security systems. For example, we’ve implemented Sucuri and Cloudflare for clients as part of their Drupal builds in the past.

4. Community

Outside of its core, hired team, Drupal thrives on the code of thousands of contributing volunteers. Open-source community projects are a major source of innovation for a lot of software companies, with businesses like Adobe Commerce (Magento) and Microsoft encouraging developers to engage in their code. Drupal is an example of the success of that community participation.

This is incredibly beneficial to your website in two major ways. One, your website will rest on a platform that is constantly being updated to meet the latest security and performance standards. As long as you have an ongoing strategy in place to keep your website in sync with those updates, you don’t have to worry about working from an antiquated, legacy platform.

Two, the widespread adoption of Drupal among developers means that you have a large pool of developers to choose from. This lowers your risk of developer lock-in, allowing you to more freely shop around for a development agency that works best with you, or build your own internal development team.

5. Scalability

Drupal’s open-source build makes it easily scalable, allowing it to grow to better fit the needs of your business.

Integrations

Drupal’s open-source build allows developers to directly engage with the source code of your CMS. This is especially beneficial for businesses that need custom integrations, a specific line of communication, between their website and their software. Drupal’s underlying framework–under Symphony–makes it object-oriented, and easy for your developers to work with.

Traffic

Drupal’s architecture means that (as long as you have the correct server resources) you can continue to serve up content to endless streams of traffic (this, in particular, is one of the reasons Drupal is preferred by enterprise businesses).

Unique Content Strategies

Whether you need a “headless” CMS serving content to your app, or you need a CMS that can handle the content of your online store by pairing with your eCommerce platform, Drupal is incredibly flexible and supportive of virtually any kind of content strategy.

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What are some of Drupal's noteworthy features?
  • User-friendly interfaces
  • Strong content management tools
  • Multi-language support
  • Publishing and workflow control
  • Supports SEO and accessibility best practices
  • Open-source platform with a robust community of contributors
  • Security 
  • Ability to seamlessly integrate with other tools
  • Built on a modular framework
  • Future-proof; scales with you as your business grows
How much does Drupal cost?

While Drupal is free to use as an open-source platform, there are other factors at play when it comes to the cost of a Drupal website redesign.

The initial implementation and customization of your Drupal website, such as adding unique content types, custom design/UX, and views, typically require help from a developer. A Drupal website build can cost anywhere from $25,000-$125,000 depending on the level of customization needed.

What are the benefits of Drupal being an open-source platform?

As an open-source platform, Drupal has a large development community, great reliability, proven security, and vast opportunities for customization—you can modify any aspect of the Drupal platform. In comparison, other proprietary platforms only permit you to customize their platform in specific, limited ways through their own interface.

Additionally, Drupal maintains a core team of developers, but a significant part of its development comes from contributions from the web development community.

How do you manage a Drupal website?

As a website administrator, you have quite a bit of control over your website. In Drupal, you have the ability to:

  • Build new pages using the page layouts in different content types.
  • Drag and drop paragraph types on a page to create new layouts.
  • Manage footers, menus, and user navigation.
  • Create webforms, manage automated email sends.
  • View submissions on your website.

These are just a few of the basic functionalities of Drupal as a CMS. However, you will need a developer to accomplish tasks such as:

  • Updating the website design.
  • Integrating plugins, extensions, or other systems with your website.
  • Deploying security patches.
How does Drupal compare to other CMS platforms?
  • Its Secure: With an active development community and regular patch releases, Drupal is very quick to address system vulnerabilities and keep its platform up to date.
  • It’s Easy to Build: Drupal’s open source build and modular framework make it easy to customize and work with.
  • It’s Easy to Integrate With: No website is an island. Most websites need to connect to several other systems - whether email marketing, a CRM, or customer service tools—in order to fully support the entire marketing strategy. Drupal’s open-source build makes it easy to connect with other tools.

Why Drupal Appeals to Most Digital Strategies

With a majority of the internet’s websites resting on a CMS platform of one type or another, here’s a summary of why we think Drupal is one of the most beneficial platforms to businesses:

Incredibly custom websites can be built very quickly with Drupal’s modular system, and easily managed after.

As the leader in current CMS technology, Drupal isn’t going anywhere in the foreseeable future. A website built on a Drupal CMS will not be in danger of becoming a legacy, as long as it’s updated.

Drupal is scalable and can grow to accommodate surging traffic, new marketing integrations, and changing digital strategies. You don’t have to worry about outgrowing Drupal.

Drupal is fully capable of operating as the center of your digital marketing plan.

Drupal Frequently Asked Questions
Is Drupal good for custom websites?

Drupal is best used by businesses that need something custom. This could mean a client portal, pure publishing, a complicated UX, or supporting an ecommerce website with integrated content. Typically, the more complex your website needs to be, the higher your need for a custom website that has been specifically built for the purpose of supporting your strategy.

How popular is Drupal CMS?

Drupal continues to grow in popularity as the years progress. We’ve seen numerous well-known websites use Drupal to grow their brand. Today you might notice sites like Verizon, New York State, and Entertainment Weekly all use Drupal.

What is Drupal's Headless CMS used for?

The benefit of Drupal’s headless CMS is that by disconnecting the front end from the backend, you can still take advantage of the backend’s content editing and data-storing capabilities while having content styled and served by your choice of application or framework. A headless CMS is great for building incredibly custom UX or mobile apps.

What's the latest version of Drupal? Which one should I use?

Drupal 10 is the most recent Drupal update. It boasts easier tools, more innovation, and an easier upgrade process. Older versions of Drupal may not be properly supported, especially if you run into problems. 

Smaller security updates may be more frequent. A bug fix (patch) release window is on the first Wednesday of each month and a security release window is on the third Wednesday of each month. Rest assured that Drupal is consistently updating their platform to ensure better performance and security.

What kinds of websites is Drupal best for?

Drupal websites are used by nonprofits, government agencies, corporations, manufacturers, and more. This secure platform is easy to customize, integrate, and upgrade depending on the unique needs of any business. We’ve helped numerous organizations reach their goals using Drupal.

How secure is Drupal?

Drupal is one of the most secure CMS platforms available. Open-source platforms that are supported by a large, active, development community are generally more secure. By allowing everyone to access the code, the number of developers working on a vulnerability will be much wider than on a proprietary platform. Read more in Website Security: Open Source vs SaaS.

What are Drupal Modules? How do they work?

Drupal has a modular framework, which means that new website features can be added to it as easily as installing a plugin. Individual modules are added to Drupal to create unique functionalities and features for users and administrators depending on their specific needs. Drupal really begins to come into its own after it’s been customized.

Is the Drupal admin easy to use?

Drupal provides an admin interface that non-technical users can use to easily manage content tasks like creating new page layouts and managing information architecture.

Though it is a bit of a steeper learning curve for new users, our team will customize your admin interface to fit your unique processes and provide in-depth training and reference materials to help you get started. If you're interested in learning more about the Drupal admin interface, set up a free intro call and we'll give you a tour to help get you started.

Why choose Drupal as my content management system?

Drupal is one of the most secure website platforms available that grow to fit the needs of your business. It offers great scalability, flexibility, accessibility, and ease of use. It also has no licensing cost in addition to many advanced features. Learn about Drupal development.

How can Bear Group help?

When choosing a new website CMS, you’re likely looking for one that’s going to scale with your organization, be capable of adapting to changing marketing needs, and provide a solid foundation. You’ll need something flexible, scalable, easy to use, and reliable — we recommend Drupal.

Our experienced team of Drupal developers can help you bring your website to life. If you don’t have your own design team, Bear Group can connect you with leading designers to help create your vision. 

When it comes to your Drupal website, our team can assist you with: