Drupal is a powerful, flexible, and productive tool, but only in professional hands. Despite all its difficulties, it will always be in demand, because the corporate development market is increasing. Although the Drupal core package includes a full-fledged admin panel, in which you can perform all system settings without using the console and accessing the source code, Drupal does not claim to be a friendly interface for beginners. If you’re experienced and looking to build on drupal, you can get drupal hosting from supporthost at low rates.
Key Beneficiaries
The key beneficiaries of this CMS are the following:
- Experienced web developers and small teams engaged in the creation of sites for individual client requests, and provision of various Drupal services;
- Web agencies of all sizes looking for a quality framework;
- Large and medium-sized businesses, which need an effective management tool and environment for centralized content management.
The corporate sector, with which Drupal is definitely on friendly terms, includes serious media portals, websites of state-owned companies, universities, fintech companies, large retail sites, etc.
Despite the presence of modules for organizing blogs and forums, launching a small information site on Drupal is not the most logical decision. It is justified only if you need non-standard functionality and complex logic for forming blocks on different types of pages.
You definitely don’t need to install this CMS for landing pages, business cards, and other small-page sites. For the needs of a small business, it is more logical to use one of the online builders (it will be cheaper and faster).
Functionality
Even a basic set of modules with a Drupal core will be able to provide the majority of typical functions for working with sites of any size and theme. The following features are supported in the standard edition:
- CNC control (no automation, only manual URL input);
- image editing and their optimization;
- built-in search engine;
- automatic updating of translations, plugins, and Drupal core;
- integration with the CRON task scheduler;
- flexible creation of various types of content and additional fields to them;
- taxonomies management (categories, tags, and other attributes for content filtering);
- a content moderation system and a complex system for managing access rights;
- downloading and installing third-party plugins/themes, etc.
If something is not available in the basic set, you can look for alternative plugins. For example, to replace unreadable service addresses, you can configure automatic CNCs using the autopath, ctools, token, and transliteration plugins.
Out of the box, Drupal can do everything you need for SEO: manually rewrite URLs, add all important meta tags, speed up page loading with caching, etc.
Conclusion
Drupal is the most advanced open source general-purpose free CMS on the market. Starting with version 8, the developers have radically changed the vector of the system’s development. Now it is a universal platform for any tasks of large and medium-sized businesses. On Drupal, you can run not only complex high-load portals, online stores, social networks, and other types of projects, but also organize the support of modern web applications. Otherwise, it is a very flexible system that will suit professional developers and web agencies.
