A lot has been said about Drupal over the years and its potential as a platform for developing sites, but some people tend to be a bit skeptical about adopting it, especially those that are already used to other platforms. It’s true that the market is quite diverse and there are multiple options that one can try, but there are various good reasons for Drupal’s current popularity, and one should not ignore it when planning the deployment of a new site. If you are still not convinced that Drupal is the ideal choice for you, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the main benefits the platform holds over its competitors.
Great degree of customization
One of the main drawing factors of Drupal is the ease with which it can be customized and extended to do a variety of additional things on top of what it offers by default. All you have to do is take a quick look around the Web and you’re going to find a large number of plugins and even complete external applications that can take a huge load off your shoulders.
Drupal is known for being a flexible platform, and anyone who’s had to implement more complicated ideas with it can probably attest to that very easily. Of course, you’ll have to spend some time learning how the development process for that platform actually works, but once you’ve built up some base experience, it tends to be quite easy.
Making new themes and plugins for Drupal is a piece of cake, and you can easily customize readily available ones and get great results too. In general, as long as you have some time available to dedicate to the project, you should be able to do quite a lot to bring it closer to your original vision. Or you may find out that certain aspects of that vision are incompatible with reality – either way, you’ll at least make some progress and gain a better understanding of how the platform functions and what others are doing with it.
Good for fast development of new sites
Drupal also makes it trivial to deploy a new site and get it up and running in no time. You don’t have to go through complicated setup procedures, and you’ll find “kits” that can assist you in pretty much every aspect of building your new site from the ground up. Combined with a good Drupal hosting provider who knows what they’re doing, you really don’t nave to worry about any issues that could potentially slow you down.
Drupal’s active support means that you’ll be able to get professional help in case something goes wrong that’s beyond your expertise too, although it’s very unlikely that you will be unable to find a solution to your problem on the Internet. There are tons of discussions about the platform out there, and many of them are related to issues people tend to commonly come across. And if you still can’t find an answer to your problem somewhere out there, you can just join that community yourself and ask your question directly.
Active community
Which brings us to another great point about Drupal – it enjoys a lot of attention from its users and developers, and there is no shortage of discussions about it online. This means that, no matter what kind of problem you might experience with the platform, you’ll at least be able to get attention for it quite easily, and you may even start a more interesting discussion that gets other people involved as well. You never know when you might discover a problem that has been bothering a large number of people but nobody has said anything about it yet, and this might even earn you some positive points in the community too!
Perfect for developers
Drupal is better suited for those who have some prior development experience, that’s true – but this doesn’t have to be a disadvantage if you know how to make proper use of the platform and how to extend it in the right direction. Even if you don’t have any experience with software development yourself, you should be able to pick up the basics quite easily by following some online guides. Drupal is not a bad place to get started with something like that, as it can be a relatively gentle introduction into the more complicated aspects of software development.
When you’ve had a chance to build a project from scratch, implementing important features yourself by looking up how things work online, this can give you a great insight into how Drupal behaves and you’ll know roughly what to expect from the platform in certain situations. This can be a huge advantage when troubleshooting later on, and you might even build up enough experience to become a Drupal expert helping out others and resolving their problems!