Why Drupal?
Here are a few reasons why Drupal will be your choice of technology for your website:
1.With Drupal you get the advantages of a CMS as well as a framework. A content management system (CMS) allows you to store content in a database and lets you publish them with ease on the web. CMS allows you to choose from automated templates, work with a solid access control system to differentiate between users, content moderators, and administrators, collaborate content by allowing more than one authors to take control of the same content. Whereas a framework allows you to develop dynamic websites where users can interact with each other and the content, alleviates the problem of overhead associated with common activities and allows developers to reuse code as and when possible, and provides the developers with a platform where they can hook into the existing framework with their custom solutions with ease. Using the framework, the community has created more than 7000 modules and it keeps growing day by day. "Drupal = CMS + Framework" and that is extremely powerful. See http://drupal.org/about
2.Drupal, by default, has an excellent user management system with provisions for roles and thus a robust access control mechanism. All the features in Drupal can be controlled via permissions which is great for a social network. See http://drupal.org/documentation/modules/user
3.Drupal allows you to easily integrate taxonomy with your content. You can define a number of content types and then create vocabularies which can be used by the content types and you can mix and match as you wish. By default, you can also allow free tagging with each and every content type, e.g. blog. See http://drupal.org/documentation/modules/taxonomy
4.And btw, did you know that there is an excellent bunch of documentation with handbooks for virtually everything. You can learn how to use the CMS in a very short span of time and also how to use their framework (they call it hooks). See http://drupal.org/handbooks
5.A website's outreach determines its rank. Over the years, SEO and SMM have gained a lot of importance as they let your site reach your target audience in a short span of time. Via Pathauto, Drupal allows you to build SEO friendly URLs and no no, you dont need to specify a URL for all your content, it can be configured with precision for all types of content.
6.When talking about CMS, Drupal allows you to create holders for different types of content (called 'Content Type') using the module CCK (and yes with latest version of Drupal, it is already there in core). Every content type is different and has its unique set of configurations, one can even set different types of templates for each content type.
7.How often do you need to create dynamic listing of content? And in different ways? Drupal allows you to create a dynamic listing of different types of content via Views through an admin interface. Almost all the parameters are configurable and you can do all that without writing a single query onto your database. And with so many hooks available, if there is something that cannot be achieved via the interface, you can write a small piece of code and you are done (of course you need to then understand the information architecture of your Drupal site). What more, you can choose the different types of displaying the content via admin interface itself.
8.In this information era, it is impossible to be just a website, you need to be able to marry your website with something or the other. More often than not, you need to integrate with 3rd parties like Google Analytics, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Google Maps, Bookmarking sites, Adsense, ApacheSolr, Lucene, Google Charts, etc. You name it and you'll have a module to help you integrate 3rd parties with Drupal.
9.Back anything with an active community and you have a gold mine at hand. Drupal community has gone from strength to strength over the last few years. Recently a lot of local Drupal groups around the world came together to do some intense code sprint and help release Drupal release its much awaited Drupal 7 version. See http://drupal.org/community
10.To engage a user with your website you need some outstanding features and Drupal comes handy here as well. Hundreds of features are available out of the box in the name of actively maintained contributed modules. Name it and you have it - five star rating, vote up-down, reviews, favorite content, and many more. See http://drupal.org/project/Modules
11.You own an amazing local shop but you never thought you could go global, eCommerce is the way to go. Drupal has an amazing support for eCommerce in the name of Ubercart (Drupal Commerce for the latest version). All the complex entities related to online shopping are addressed with Drupal and you could just plug and play. Whether you are selling products, memberships or subscriptions, Drupal can help you go online. Upload your catalog, accept online payments, integrate with major shipping services, and make reports out of your online Drupal store.
12.Drupal supports internationalization and you can translate your website into multiple languages with the word 'Go'.
13.Can you integrate my voice application with my website? What about facebook application? twitter? mobile application? another website? Yes, why not, Drupal brings it easy. You can use the Services module to create APIs that can be used via multiple interfaces like XML-RPC, JSON, SOAP, REST, etc. You want to make presence in all domains and Drupal could just be the starting point.
14.Its free, free to download, free to keep and free to modify. Being an open source software, it lets you save loads of licensing fees over the years.
15.And if you still think you dont buy that easy, lets take a look at the big guns who are using drupal: WhiteHouse, NewYork Observer, Popular Science, AOL Corporate, MTV UK, Sony Music, Warner Brothers Records, Ubuntu Brainstorm and many more.
Drupal has given new dimensions to CMS world and almost everyone either wants to build their website in Drupal or port to it. We provide a bunch of Drupal services. We would love to get in touch with you and offer you the best ROI.
