Drupal in a nutshell: our CMS and framework of choice

Written by
Barry Fisher
Technical Director

There have been many articles written about the technical reasons to use Drupal, but what are the “real world” benefits? I hope to make that a bit clearer here in just a few words.

Drupal is a tool for creating powerful web sites. It is managed and maintained by various developers around the globe with a whole range of interest areas. By contributing their (and our) efforts to a central pool, we can all benefit from each other's work. This means we don't reinvent the wheels that have already been created by someone else. A simple example is an image gallery... once one has been created why spend time trying to do it again if somebody has already provided a perfect solution?

So why would anyone give away their work for free?

The answer is that by “opening up” the source code for anyone to contribute to allows for feedback and improvement of a particular feature (or “module” in Drupal parlance). This collaboration creates a whole eco-system resulting in a far better product than traditional developer time constraints. It also leads to many discussions about how best to solve problems rather than hacking together ad-hoc solutions for each project.

Because of these reasons Drupal offers us a wide range of tools that are:

Secure or robust
Well thought out by many people and from many different backgrounds
Accessible for developers to extend and enhance features
Flexible to work with custom designs

We are a proud member of the Drupal Association who nurture improvements to Drupal project on a grander scale.

We are all active members of the Drupal community and collaborate with others to work on common solutions, benefiting thousands of websites all around the world.