Drupal – How Web Programming Can Benefit or Lose from it

Drupal is an open-source CMS (content management system) which has earned quite a significant popularity with its features. By using Drupal, you can create complex websites easily because there is a Drupal community to give you any kind of assistance in the designing and web programming process. It also offers an array of modules.

First, let’s take a look at the advantages of using Drupal –

• It is an open-source platform.
• It is extremely customizable, which gives you the freedom to create a content–centric as well as user-generated website. That means, you can build anything from a forum to an image gallery.
• It has a huge community of learned people – Yes, Drupal’s open-source community is among the biggest and the best in the world. It contains not only developers but supporters and users as well. They help you with a continuous supply of online tutorials, fast fixing of bugs, core updates and excellent support.
• Drupal offers countless modules to expand its capabilities.
• Drupal gives developers endless opportunities. If you are a developer, there is actually no limit to how much you can do with Drupal. It was created for giving designers complete freedom. Many CMSs focus more on the convenience and user-friendliness of the end-user, which makes the actual development and website programming process very cumbersome and challenging for the developers.
• There is a caching system integrated in Drupal. This system speeds up the response time of the pages and lessens the load on web-servers. It also results in a better performance of the web servers.
• Drupal has an integrated search feature which is quite good, though no match for outside search features such as Google or Yahoo! Still, this kind of search feature is not usually found in most other CMSs.

After the advantages, here comes some disadvantages of Drupal:

• If you are new to Drupal and want your website programming to be over in a short time, say, within a week, using Drupal will not be a clever choice. It takes some time to understand Drupal.
• If you are not a developer, Drupal can be challenging for you since it is made for aiding to the needs of developers.
• Drupal has a complicated admin user-interface, though it will change very soon, Drupal’s user-interface is not as easy to use as it is expected to be.

Let’s put Drupal in a competition with WordPress:

Comparisons are bound to occur because WordPress is a leading open-source CMS and so is Drupal. If you are creating a very complex website wherein there will be customized content, user registration, custom permissions etc., it’s better to use Drupal Development services.

If you want just a blog or a portfolio site, it is better to use WordPress.

If you want inspiration and a little motivation for using Drupal, Mozilla and Ubuntu are some of the well-known websites that use it.