Drupal

What is Drupal

Drupal is a free and open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 1% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to larger corporate and political sites including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk.


10 Reasons to use Drupal

Here are 10 reasons why you should seriously be considering Drupal for your SEO-based Web development projects:

  • Advanced URL Control: The Global Redirect Module will automatically 301 redirect the internal Drupal URL to the custom URL alias. Unlike many other content management systems, Drupal's content pages have nice clean URLs.
  • Custom Content Types and Views: You can use the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views Modules to create new content types and create advanced custom views for them without writing any code. A few examples of "content types" are "blog posts", "news stories", "forum posts", "tutorials", "classified ads", "podcasts".  
  • Revision Control: You can configure Drupal to save a new version of your pages every time they are editing. That means that you can go back to view or revert old revisions if you want.  
  • Taxonomy: Drupal has a powerful taxonomy (category) system that allows you to organize and tag content. Each Drupal "vocabulary" (set of categories) can be limited to certain content types. For example, you could have blog contents that allowed free tagging (similar to WordPress categories), while your news section might have a different vocabulary (set of categories) that could only be selected from an existing list of categories.
  • User Management: Drupal was designed for community-based Web sites and has strong user role and access control functionality. You can create as many custom user roles with custom access levels as you need.
  • Page Titles and Meta Tags: Drupal's Page Title Module gives you custom control of your HTML <title> elements, while the Meta Tags Module gives you control over your pages' individual meta description tags. This is difficult in some content management systems, but it's easy with Drupal.  
  • Excellent Documentation: Documentation includes the official handbooks, the massive API Reference, numerous tutorials, blogs, videos, and podcasts, and the excellent new book Pro Drupal Development.  
  • PHP Template: Drupal uses the PHP Template theme engine by default. Theming in Drupal is easier than theming in WordPress and doesn't necessarily require any PHP knowledge. Drupal's Theme Developer Guide is a great resource.
  • Drupal Cookbooks: f you want a feature that is not built into Drupal by default, chances are that someone has already written a code snippet for it and posted it in the code snippets section of Drupal.org.
  • Large and Friendly Community: For an idea of the size of the developer community, take a look at the long list of community-contributed modules. The Drupal forum is highly active and are a great place to get your Drupal questions answered.