5 Reasons why you should use Drupal
It's Powerful
With great power comes great flexibility. Drupal does not so much see itself as a content management system, but more as a content management framework. This means, it can be used to build any type of web application – website, intranet, secure portal – including a content management system. To put it simply, there is nothing that can't be built in PHP (Facebook for example), that can't be built with Drupal.
It's Secure
Since Drupal is built as an Open Source platform, its codebase is very closely scrutinised. Open Source means the code that powers it is freely available for anyone to look at, use, modify, and contribute to. When you make your source code available in this manner, you've to make sure it's top notch code. Since anyone can contribute to it – and thousands of people across the world do – you then get code that has thousands of pairs of eyes invigilating it at all times. Proprietary code manufacturers cannot give this guarantee; when using closed source software, you have no idea what potential security flaws are present.
It's Search Engine Friendly
Drupal “out of the box” is quite well optimised for search engines, especially when Drupal 7 arrived back in 2011 with RDF support enabled. Drupal code is written quite semantically, and its ability to use alt and title tags for images and other uploaded media gives it quite a push in SEO terms. Okay, I've used the word quite three times now. And 'quite' is not quite good enough. The brilliance of Drupal lies in the 20,000+ contributed modules that are available for it. When it comes to SEO there is no shortage of modules to turn something that is quite good into something that is super, such as the SEO compliance checker, SEO checklist, Global Redirect, Metatag, Search 404, XML Sitemap, and Pathauto modules to name just a few that made it onto Netmag's 20 Best Drupal Modules for SEO list.
It's Cutting Edge
Whatever is the latest up-and-coming trend in the software development world, is the latest up-and-coming trend in the Drupalverse. Drupal was the first to make responsive (base) themes available to ensure that any site could benefit from the increased user-experience that a mobile-friendly website brings with it. In Drupal 8 all themes will be responsive by default. It was the first major CMS to adopt RDF for semantic data. Also in Drupal 8 will be the awesomeness of in-line editing – if you want to change a page title, then you can do so without having to load the full edit screen; same for menu items, images, footer links, copy – anything. Perhaps the biggest feature to come in Drupal 8 will be the configuration in code aspect – so no longer will configuration be stored in a database (needing the features module to come rescue it!), from now on (almost) the only thing to be placed in your content management system's database is ... content!
It's Free
Drupal is 100% free. You do not pay for Drupal. You do not pay a licence fee to use it. You do not pay a repeating licence fee each year. It is free, free, free. This means anyone can download it and build a website as complex as The Economist's, The White House's, or Harvard University's. All you need to do is roll up your sleeves, be prepared to learn something new, and have fun. Failing that, you could call the experts who have gone through this learning curve already (that's us, Annertech!).
