What is Drupal and Why Should You Consider It?
Drupal is one of the most well-known and trusted content management systems available today. For over 15 years, Bear Group has worked on Drupal websites. We’ve seen first-hand why this platform is a secure, smart choice for government, enterprise/B2B, nonprofit, higher education websites, 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 itself is incredibly flexible and can fit many needs, which is why we sometimes refer to it as the “Swiss army knife” of platforms.
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 $15,000 - $100,000 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 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:
See if Bear Group is the right team for you
We'll listen to the challenges you're facing, identify needs, and show you how we can build something better together.
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
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.
The benefit of Drupal’s headless CMS is that by disconnecting the frontend 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 an incredibly custom UX or mobile apps.
Drupal 9 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. For Drupal 8 and above, minor (feature) releases are scheduled approximately every six months, usually on either the first or third Wednesday of that month. 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.
Drupal websites are used by manufacturers, nonprofits, government agencies, corporations, 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.
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.
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.
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.
Drupal is one of the most secure website platforms available that grows 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 how Drupal is used to create websites.