Ok so I think you know now that at Enovation we love Moodle, so today I thought I would tell you about another cool product that we customise and support for our clients, Drupal. Drupal is a very cool open source Content Management System (CMS).
The best way of introducing Drupal is look at the most common questions people ask us about it. Beware: Drupal is addictive, once you hear a bit about it you will want to hear a whole lot more!
What can Drupal be used for?
Drupal is so flexible that it can be used for simple personal web sites about you and your dog, right through to complex knowledge management and business collaboration platforms.
Who uses Drupal?
Short answer a hell of a lot of people. Drupal websites make up 1.5% of all websites worldwide, pretty impressive huh? Lets look at some of the Drupal website that you may have used before:
- White House – http://www.whitehouse.gov
- The US House of Representives – http://www.house.gov/
- The Economist – http://www.economist.com/
- Symantec Connect – http://www.symantec.com/connect/
- AOL Corporate – http://corp.aol.com/
- Portland State University – http://www.pdx.edu/
- Warner Bros. Records – http://www.warnerbrosrecords.com/
Why use Drupal?
- You are part of a community – Deciding to build your site in Drupal means deciding to become part of the big Drupal community. This community is made up of thousands of Drupal developers, all developing Drupal extensions. These extension can be used by you as part of the Drupal community. There are around 6000 modules ready for you to add onto your Drupal site. You will find everything from Web2.0 add-ons to CAPTCHAs for your forms, to Lightboxes, all ready to download and integrate into your site.
- Content Editors will love you – Editing content on a drupal site is easy! When your content editor logs in they will see an edit tab for each panel in the parts of the web site that they can edit. To edit the content they simply click edit and up pops a WYSIWYG editor. All they need to do then is make the changes, save and they are done.
- Content separate from Presentation – In Drupal the presentation of content is treated completely separate to that content. No longer do you need to think how to amend your branding to suit the new web platform – drupal is flexible enough to be themed to meet your branding needs.
- URL Control – With Drupal you can give a custom URL for any piece of content (known as nodes) in the CMS.
- Content organised through a taxonomy – Drupal’s back bone is its taxonomy. The taxonomy is used to organise all the content in Drupal. This allows for easy navigation of the content in a Drupal website and also allows the user to retrieve all content to do with that topic – even if it is user generated.
- User Management – Drupal allows for the creation of as many user roles as you need in order to manage access control.Where do I go for more Information?
Have a look at the Drupal website on http://drupal.org. If you have any other questions why not give us a shout at Enovation – we would love to talk to you about Drupal!
