What is Drupal, and How Can It Help Your Business?

Drupal is a web development framework that makes it easier for developers and companies to build websites for a whole wide list of purposes. It’s meant to be a toolset that allows web design and development experts to save time when building blogs, ecommerce platforms, and other more complex websites with various forms of functionality.

The reason Drupal is so important is because it’s an example of one of the golden rules of web development: don’t reinvent the wheel. It allows for an easier time in designing and building websites. Often, Drupal is primarily used as something that has little to do with hands-down web development: content management. That’s because it’s great at content management, but that’s not its only strength.

How Drupal Began

As per TechTarget, when Drupal first started, it was a bulletin board system developed in the Netherlands which turned into an open-source project. A bulletin board system, as per Webopedia, is a joint file system/message center/forum hosted on a server and accessed through a terminal, built with custom software.

With time, Drupal became a framework for a collection of different projects through APIs and optional modules, and dedicated Drupal developers can build very complex feature-rich forums, social networks, blogs, and ecommerce sites utilizing said toolset.

Drupal is written in PHP, and can be downloaded and installed with a web-based installer and the option of a myriad of add on modules to help you build blogs, forums, portals, websites, resource directories, and social networks, among other web-based platforms.

All that, however, doesn’t mean absolutely everyone should use Drupal. Sometimes, a case can easily be made for the system, and there are other times where you might be better off using something else, especially when your project is turning into less of a website and more of a browser-based software-as-a-service.

Utilizing Drupal

Drupal is great, if what you need is simple. If you’re a small business looking for a way to create a community-driven hub for industry-specific content – like a forum, or a little social platform – then Drupal works well. As a blog with several users from your company’s side, it also serves its purpose and acts as a customizable alternative to the popular Wordpress.

If you’re a small company and you’d like to work with professionals who can quickly build you a simple yet feature-rich online platform or website, then looking for web development experts in Los Angeles with Drupal expertise is a good place to start. Alternatively, companies like Ender Technology can immediately provide you with a team of reputed experts to work with.

When Drupal Doesn’t Match Your Needs

But there are also cases where what Drupal has on offer isn’t what you’re looking for. For all its merits and qualities of flexibility, there are a few big drawbacks to Drupal that make it a bad fit for specifically large projects as per Yuriy Babenko.

Drupal is too large, and too all-over-the-place. You’ll want to work with a more lightweight, specific framework if you’re building a web-based application with multiple user inputs and a complicated step-by-step content system, for example.

In these cases, utilizing Drupal isn’t the best idea for you or your business. But in most cases, Drupal does offer you most of what you need to get the job done with a quality developer.