Drupal
Drupal is perhaps the most elegant Open Source CMS solution available. Once set up, it is a superb CMS for the non-technical user. It also pleases coders and professional web designers with it's outstanding design and build quality.

Drupal is the CMS that professional developers love. Drupal is not your typical content management system. Non-technical users can build an excellent website from the basic installation, but Drupal is known to have a steeper learning curve than similar systems such as Joomla. A knowledge of, or willingness to learn, some PHP will be needed to make full use of Drupal's extensive functionality.

Those users with some coding skill will particularly appreciate the elegance of Drupal's design and build standards. Drupals modular design and well-documented, clean codebase make it easier for individuals with knowledge of PHP to write code for additional features.

Drupal is often used to build sites that focus on user communities because of its excellent permission module which makes it possible to finely restrict and permit access to particular pages, both for viewing and editing purposes.

Drupal's taxonomy (or categorisation system) enables the site administrator to determine how content is classified. Once set up, the taxonomy module can “automatically classify new content”. This flexibility, without the need for coding, differentiates Drupal from similar systems; it also makes the configuration more demanding and in some cases more time consuming.

The Actions and Workflow modules provide an example of the high degree of automation possible with Drupal. This requires the two modules to be set up using features from both. Extensive support documentation and videos are available to help configure the Workflow and Actions modules[3] to achieve tasks such as sending out notices of new content.

Drupal achieves clean integration between the core and the modules via a system of hooks, or callbacks, to allow modules to insert functions into Drupal's path of execution. Drupal core provides protection against many of the usual security problems, like SQL injection.

If you want a user friendly platform that professional developers love and you have some technical aptitude for the more complex functions, then Drupal is an excellent choice.

The standard features are:

  • Publishing syndicated content (e.g. rss feeds)
  • Controlling content that appears in the side columns
  • User blogs
  • Category creation and management
  • Content commenting
  • Contact page
  • Forum
  • Context sensitive help
  • multi-language support
  • menu customisation
  • wysiwyg editors for content
  • SEO friendly urls
  • Automatically notify others sites that your site has changed
  • Community voting
  • Extending users account information
  • Search
  • Statistics
  • Article teasers with read more links to main article content
  • Cron and caching
  • Congestion control
  • Collaborate with files
  • access and management settings
  • Notification of latest content added to the site

 

If you want a user friendly platform that professional developers love and you have some technical aptitude for the more complex functions, then Drupal is an excellent choice.

For more information, please watch the tutorials and make sure you are using your content management system to your best advantage.