Why Use Drupal?

Duo Consulting has been helping businesses and organizations build sites for more than a decade now, and it’s become more and more true that whatever else your website may need, it surely needs fresh, relevant content. Content is king, now more than ever: it drives traffic to your site, and that in turn drives your business success -- whether that be through purchases, contacts and leads, advertising, etc.

Why a Content Management System?

If the need for good content is now a given, then having a Content Management System (CMS) behind your site is now no longer an option, but an absolute business necessity. A good CMS will empower you to change and add content to your site as quickly as you can think of making those changes. You should only be relying on someone else to make your content changes if it makes sense for your business (because of workflow/editorial issues, or because you want to use a professional writer, for instance) -- but definitely not because you are in any way constrained technically. If you are relying on a developer to make your content changes, then you are incurring two unnecessary sins in business -- cost and delay.

What Are the Options for a CMS?

Once you acknowledge the need for a CMS, then finding the right one can be a challenge. There are consultants and services out there to help you choose the right CMS (examples: CMS Watch at http://www.cmswatch.com/, and Content Here at http://www.contenthere.net/), which can be invaluable if you’re not sure where to start. There are, literally, hundreds of CMSs out there, and it can be daunting to even start figuring out what criteria and corresponding features will be most crucial for you and your organization to evaluate.

Duo has supported many Content Management Systems over the years (and we continue to do so for several of these): our own ColdFusion-based custom CMS, Hot Banana, Serena Collage, Sitecore, Ektron, eZ Publish, Hannon Hill’s Cascade Server, and Drupal. We committed to using so many (and exploring several others as well) because we wanted to ensure that we were working with the right technologies for our clients. These CMSs offer a wide range of features, and we wanted to make sure that we were using the right one for each client.

So, Why Drupal?

That said, Duo is increasingly turning to Drupal for our clients, precisely because it answers so many needs for so many of our clients. Drupal (http://drupal.org) is an open-source CMS, and it comes with (or can easily be expanded to include):

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)-friendly configuration options, such as human- readable URLs
• user registration and user accounts
• blogs and forums
• comments
• contact forms
• search
• social networking integration options
• content tagging
• ecommerce shopping carts

These are features that even just a few years ago would only have been expected -- and trusted to work -- within a proprietary, commercial system. Open-source systems (note that Drupal is not the only one) have had these options for a while, but until recently, they haven’t been robust enough to support enterprise-level organizations.

Ready for Prime Time, Ready for Your Business

That’s just not the case anymore. Drupal has been evolving and maturing in sophistication since 2000, and it contains and supports a robust and well-vetted feature set. The features listed above are a tiny subset of what Drupal offers, and the community of developers who actively work on and contribute to the code base now numbers in the many, many thousands.

From a business perspective, Drupal offers significant advantages.

Speed to Market

If you want to create a Drupal website, you can do so almost instantly -- simply install the code for what you want, and you’re up and running. Note that the Drupal community has made things even easier than that by offering a variety of distributions (see http://drupal.org/node/326175), which are essentially pre-configured installations that already come with many of the most popular features. You can even quickly change the look of the site by choosing and installing one of the many design themes (see http://drupal.org/project/Themes) that have been made publicly available.

Security

One of the advantages of having such a large development community is precisely having so many eyes on the code -- it’s crowd-sourcing at its most practical. Developers see and report issues, and developers then fix those issues as quickly as they can. Drupal regularly issues security alerts (see http://drupal.org/security), so you have the ability to stay on top of any issues that arise.

Budget Control

With Drupal, you get to choose how much you want to spend on your website. The software itself is free, of course, and after that, you get to choose your level of investment:

• do you want managed hosting?
• do you want a customized design for the site?
• do you want custom integration with other software your organization uses?

The list goes on.

Perhaps even more importantly, you get to choose your level of investment over time. If you want to add an ecommerce solution, it doesn’t mean you have to do it immediately -- it can be something you add on in the next budget cycle. You’re not just getting flexibility in your software feature set -- you’re also getting flexibility in how your CMS fits your business needs.

Maintenance Control

Just as you can choose how much of your budget you want to commit to development of the site, you can also choose how much you want to commit to the maintenance of the site. You can decide to maintain the site yourself (at the bare minimum, you should be comfortable doing security updates). You can choose to reach out to the development community as needed. You can also find commercial support with companies like Duo Consulting at http:// www.duoconsulting.com/ or Acquia at http://acquia.com/ (Acquia provides support ranging from code distributions to hosting to training to development).

Customize Your Experience

Your experience with Drupal can be completely customized for your site administrators and your site visitors. You can choose which features you want to install or enable, and you can change how the site looks to your end-users. Perhaps just as important, you can customize your own experience with the CMS administrative tools themselves so that it makes sense for you and your team.

Future Proof

Any CMS is a major investment, so your choice had better be one that will stand the test of time -- Drupal has and will continue to. With each version, the Drupal community consciously strives to improve the user experience. Likewise, the community continues to contribute functionality as needs are seen. One example: Facebook started in February 2004 with its current incarnation coming into being in 2006. By 2007, there was already an active Drupal for Facebook project in the works. That kind of responsiveness to technologies that are still beyond the visible horizon is rarely matched by other CMSs.

So, Why Duo?

Duo Consulting has been actively working with Drupal since 2007, beginning with version 5 of the software. Aside from our familiarity with the software itself, we bring a decade’s worth of experience and best practices to all aspects of website development: programming, design, and hosting. That background is, if anything, even more important to have when working with powerful tools such as Drupal:

• Duo is deeply knowledgeable about existing Drupal modules and functionality, so we know what’s already out there and can be easily integrated.
• Duo has the expertise to create custom functionality for your site if a module for it doesn’t already exist.
• Duo can help you craft the Information Architecture for your site so that all the pieces make sense, and your users can easily find what they need.
• Duo designs sites that stand apart as unique, beautiful, and usable -- your site won’t look cookie-cutter or pre-fab.
• Duo can manage the hosting of your site so you don’t have to worry about the basic maintenance and running of the site once it’s live.

We think Drupal is the best CMS for many of our clients, but we believe that Duo can provide the best implementation. When your business is ready to move forward, so are we.