I Recommend Drupal

by Chadwick Wood
October 29th, 2007

A couple of friends have asked me recently what I recommend/prefer to use for a content management system (CMS) when building a website.

For most small business, non-profit, or personal websites, I think Drupal is the best choice that I've come across.

From a developer's standpoint, Drupal is highly-configurable, extensible, and offers a ton of functionality, even in its default state. From a client's standpoint, using Drupal gives you a website that's easy to update and modify without having any background in web technologies.

The Drupal website already goes into all of the system's details, but here's a quick list of what I like:

  • Themes - The theming system in Drupal is relatively easy to understand, and allows you to make a website look however you want. I find it doesn't make a lot of the assumptions that other CMS's make about how you're going to want your site to lay out.
  • Modules - Drupal has a module system that allows you or any third-party developer to create new functionality to hook into the system. And, there's already a large collection of modules out there, so chances are that if you're looking for some specific functionality that someone else has needed in the past, there's probably a module written for what you want to do.
  • User Roles - Defining different roles with different sets of permissions for users is built-in, so it's easy to allow your non-web-savvy client to update the content on their website, while keeping them away from features like changing the navigation architecture, changing the look of the site, etc. Also, by limiting a client's permissions, you eliminate a lot of the visual clutter in the CMS (all the links to features that don't need to be messed with during normal site operation), making the client's experience of maintaining their website a lot more enjoyable.

Anyway, that's 3 perks, and there's a lot more I could say, but basically: if you're a developer looking to choose a content management system as your go-to for client projects, give Drupal a thorough look.

In the past, I've made more than a couple of CMS's from scratch, because I was hesitant to buy into any existing system, for fear that I'd spend the time to familiarize myself with it, only later to discover that its limitations would prevent me from doing everything I needed to. I have yet to feel those kinds of limitations with Drupal.