There are different content management systems that that people can choose, such as Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, Blogger and Magento. Each has different characteristics. WordPress and Joomla have bigger market share compared to Drupal, although Drupal is still more popular than many content management systems, such as Bitrix, TYPO3 and Magento. Drupal is currently used by many high traffic and popular websites, such as US Department of Energy. Just because Drupal is less popular, it doesn’t mean that Drupal is less capable. Here are benefits that you can get by using Drupal CMS:
- Thousands of themes: Drupal themes allow users to modify the look and feel of the website. At present, developers can choose from thousands of available themes. They are developed and contributed by the Drupal community. With themes, it’s easy to extend the features of the basic Drupal core. Because these themes are mostly open source, website developers can modify them to better match their requirements. Drupal allows web developers to create and modify custom themes using TWIG, which is an engine based on PHP.
- Tens thousands of modules: Modules can add extra functionality to the website, without having to write extra codes. Again, many of these modules are open source, which are can be modified to the precise requirements to the developers and users. It’s also a way to extend the basic features of basic Drupal.
- Support for responsive design: Responsive design will make a website look good on all devices with different screen size, such as a big smart TV and a small smartphone. With HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3, website design can be mobile-friendly and responsive. Drupal supports native development using HTML5.
- Multilingual capabilities: The administration interface of Drupal supports native translation. Integrated multilingual features can help to create web pages with different languages. Website content can be filtered and delivered based on the geographical location of users. The admin interface can support more than 100 languages.
- Quick content creation and editing: Drupal is essentially a powerful framework for content management. It comes with a capability to easily create, modify and distribute content. Its integrated WYSIWYG editor is known as CKEditor, which help to create drafts quickly. CKEditor is easy to use and people can modify content quite easily.
- Faster website performance: Drupal-based websites could load faster with only basic optimization. Faster loading speed should improve user experience and visibility directly. There are caching features that will speed up website performance. JavaScript is loaded only when necessary, so it will take less time for Drupal to retrieve content for users. Pages with high views will be cached and this will save CPU time.
- APIs: With Application Programming Interfaces, user experience can be boosted by using different services and applications. It will be easier for web developers to work with different services, applications and technologies. There are Drupal APIs for different purposes, such as routing, cache, authentication, database, logging and menu. Compared to modules, APIs are much more integrated and will provide near native capabilities to basic Drupal configuration.