If you poke around our website enough you’ll run into a funny word when we talk about web development, Drupal. No, it’s not an antidepressant. It’s not an African nation. It’s not a spicy Indian dish. It’s a content management system, or CMS. For those who don’t know, a CMS is an online database that stores and organizes information to display on a website.

And Drupal is our CMS of choice. We use it for all of our sites these days because it’s powerful, flexible, and clients love it. Here is a quick rundown of some of its many benefits.

Customization

Drupal doesn’t presuppose what type of website you’re trying to build. It doesn’t just spit out some templates for blogs or e-commerce sites. Instead it allows a developer to customize, tweak, remove, and add to it in order to create a site that is totally unique. No part is off limits. From content, to theme, features, and plugins, it all can be customized.

Easy Administration

The customization not only applies to the visual theme and function of a site, but to the administration side as well. With Drupal, we can set up the administration side of the site to fit with our clients’ expectation and needs. This allows us to present them with an easy-to-use interface so they can create and manage complex content without needing HTML or other programming knowledge.

Extendability

Drupal is also very flexible and modular, which allows sites to easily grow and expand in functionality over time. Our clients aren’t stuck needing to transfer to another system when they want to add, say, an e-commerce component to their website. Additional functionality can easily be installed, configured, and integrated.

Open Source

It’s easy to overlook this benefit, but it’s a great one. Drupal is free to use, share, and develop. There is no licensing to purchase, no software to buy. Instead of being dependent on a corporation, it’s backed by over a million community members in over 200 countries. When we launch a site, it is completely owned by the client, and they are free to do with it as they wish.

Scalability

Drupal is built to handle even the largest websites. There is almost no limit to the number of pages and amount of content you can have. It’s used to power high-profile sites like the NBC Olympics website, Tesla Motors, the Weather Channel, Verizon, the NBA, GE, Stanford University, Harvard, the White House, and more.

This is definitely not an exhaustive list, but hopefully it serves as a good intro into Drupal’s benefits and why we use this powerful, adaptable CMS. If you want to know more, Drupal has its own official page on the subject.

If you think Drupal and New Boston may be just what your website needs, just give us a holler.

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