Itomic is proud to introduce the Drupal CMS (Content Management System) to our clients – current and prospective. We’ve been supporting it for years, and it’s long overdue to be featured in the articles section of this, our primary website.
Itomic have been developing and improving our own proprietary CMS for years (we call it ‘Itomic Nucleus’). It’s served us well, and we expect it to continue serving us well for many years to come. But it’s fantastic to be able to mix and match a wider variety of solutions – at expert level – to the needs of our clients, which is where Drupal comes in.
This introductory article (expect more on Drupal to follow) will explain to a non-technical audience why Drupal might just be the ideal choice for your next website project.
Firstly, a reminder of what a CMS is. It is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website. By ‘content’ we mean pretty much anything digital: words, photos, audio, video, documents, etc. CMS software is typically described as providing the administrative “back end” part of a website, as opposed to the “front end” which is what the public sees. The software is typically installed on a web server, which is great (even if you don’t know what a web server is!) because it means that you don’t have to install a CMS (and maintain it) on your own computer. You just point your Internet browser at the right web address, login with a valid username and password, and away you go.
One of challenges for all CMS over the years has been to remain usable / user-friendly, despite the sometimes highly sophisticated functional requirements demanded of them by some CMS customers. Drupal has become increasingly more user-friendly – and sophisticated – with every new release.
There are literally 100’s of different CMS software packages out there on top of the thousands that have been developed by individual website companies (like Itomic’s Nucleus CMS) that don’t tend to get released ‘into the wild’, i.e. outside of the immediate client base of the company that developed it.
So if there are so many, what’s special or significant about Drupal?
In a nutshell – it’s *the* CMS that has most matured over the years into a product that is high quality and enterprise ready. It’s open source (which effectively removes vendor-lock), and – unbelievably for some who are not familiar with the open source model – it’s free. That’s an incredibly potent combination, one that corporates and governments worldwide are waking up to a rate of knots. It’s why Drupal is the world’s most popular Enterprise-grade open source CMS.
A website is an investment
When anyone, or any organisation, makes any investment decision, they’re looking for a return on that investment. They don’t want that investment to go bad and leave them with nothing. They want to feel comfortable that they’ve made the best decision given available information. So here’s why Drupal is an excellent, high return, low risk, choice for your next website project:
- The software is free. That’s right, zero dollars to buy, and no ongoing licence fees. Sure, you’re going to need expert help to set it up right and maintain, patch, and evolve it in the future, but you’ve already made a financial saving relative to proprietary systems.
- No vendor lock-in. This is achieved on a couple of levels:
- The software is open source, which is another way of saying that no part of it is encrypted or password-protected, which means that there’s nothing to stop you from engaging a new Drupal developer to work on your site if things don’t work out with your existing Drupal developer. Most proprietary systems are encrypted, partially or fully.
- The software is very well supported. So you have lots of choices of other Drupal developers who can ‘hit the ground running’ with the support of your website. Even if the proprietary CMS behind your existing website is not encrypted, there will likely be quite an expensive learning curve for another developer to be able to fully support it.
- High quality, tried and tested, mature. A huge diversity of organisations worldwide are catching on to the benefits of Drupal. We’d like to think all of the following organisations have done their due diligence on Drupal (well, with the possible exception of those crazy Monty Python lads!)
- Extremely flexible/adaptable/powerful. There are literally 1000s of add-on software ‘modules’ available for Drupal. So there’s a good chance that the functionality you’re after already exists ‘off-the-shelf’. And if it doesn’t – no worries! A Drupal developer will be able to adapt an existing module, or custom-write a new one from scratch.
Drupal is not only ready for business – it’s already doing big business. May we suggest that Drupal demands your consideration for your next website project!
Itomic are Drupal website experts: drupal consultancy, drupal training, drupal design, drupal development and drupal hosting. We are Acquia silver partners. Established in Perth in 2000, we now have a highly successful office in Melbourne and are on the lookout for another one. Your initial consultation is complimentary.