Last Updated on May 22, 2023
What is this Drupal CMS anyway?
Just exercising our fingers here and getting our thoughts together between support requests. Feel free to jump up and down, cheer, laugh, or bang your head on the desk, or simply raise your eyebrow – as the mood takes you. What is this Drupal CMS anyway? Here is the elevator version. Haberdashery, Sporting Goods, Ladies Wear … going up!
Of the top global 10K sites, WordPress has 40%, Drupal 9%, Joomla and Blogger 1% then a mixed bag of the rest. This picture changes depending on what country you are in but WordPress stays fairly constant. In Germany WordPress is still at 40%, but Joomla has 13%, Typo3 10%, and Drupal is at 2%.
I am very interested in websites for education and research. In North America Harvard, Rutgers, Brown, Caltech, Stanford all use Drupal for their sites – and other schools like Yale, Cornell, McGill etc also use Drupal but for peripheral sites like the library, alumni, research units etc. Though one can well imagine a complete integration there one day.
For educational websites in Germany, for example, we looked at quite a few and found it pretty one-sided. 2/3 of the sites we looked at run on Typo3. The rest are divided into either no CMS, which I found odd, or a mixture of every CMS (almost) known to man. Except Front Page. ;o)
So why Drupal? Drupal is open source – this means you can customise it and if you can program it also means the CMS is free. Though, free as in a free puppy is free :o) Free, but not for nothing.
Drupal is easily configured, and easily deployed (relatively, again, you need to know what you are doing, it isn’t like putting a lego toy together).
Drupal is an enterprise software, so if you need a big tool for a big project this CMS could be considered as being very helpful.
Drupal has extensive API support.
Drupal is mobile friendly. Very friendly. And that is good so as who carries a desktop around with them any more?
Drupal is easily customisable for multilanguage sites, and Symfony PHP and HTML5 are of course standard. (sort of squeezed these last ones together though the multilanguage part while expected really IS good in Drupal)
Ok a bit longer than 30 seconds, but if you talk fast and don’t have gum in your mouth it should probably work. ;o)
Drupal. Build something amazing. https://www.drupal.org/
* footnote – in Feb 2018 I posted about my other favourite CMS, WordPress. If you like Drupal and you like WordPress, I find they dovetail in many ways (content editing, media inclusion, SEO etc) in the CMS Thunder. Find out more about this distribution and try it out for yourself. https://thunder.org/
** What do WordPress and Drupal have in common? Probably more than you think: https://pantheon.io/blog/wordpress-goes-drupalcon-nashville