Why Drupal?

Drupal offers all the functionality that you could expect from a modern, full grown content management system, such as:

• Separation of design, structure and content, which makes it easy to modify the structure and appearance of a webpage without touching the content.
• Flexible user system with support for user roles and fine-grained permissions.
• Functionality for tagging, categorizing and searching content.
• Support for workflows and collaboration within a workgroup.

Standing out among the competitors

There are many content management tools that match this description, both on the commercial and the open source side. Drupal, however, is often referred to as a web publishing platform (as opposed to a content management tool), and there's a reason for why you'd want to make this distinction, considering Drupal's huge flexibility. This is one of the things that make Drupal stand out compared to its competitors:

• Flexibility and versatility. It is hard to find a web project that Drupal cannot handle. The way Drupal is designed for building different types of content, for listing and searching content, for handling system events etc., makes it a system that adjusts nicely to the particular project at hand – not the other way around.

• Accessibility. Drupal follows open and established standards, which makes it well equipped for meeting different needs, such as providing accessibility for persons with disabilities, good search engine optimization, and straightforward communication with external applications and services.

• Extendability. Drupal's modular architecture makes it possible to add mostly any kind of functionality you'd want. If you have a legacy data source or application, you can be certain that Drupal can be made to communicate with it. The Drupal project has a noted code quality and a well documented API, and if the core functionality is not enough, there is a huge supply of contributed modules offering added features, including e-commerce, mapping solutions, and fundamental tools for building out your site quickly.

• Community and support. Drupal has a large community of developers, documenters, translators, designers and usability experts who spend a significant amount of time on making the system even better – some of them in their spare time and others as a part of their day job. One of Drupal's major strengths is that it continuously attracts very well-qualified professionals. There are also a large number of providers of professional Drupal related services and support.

• Runs everywhere (almost). Drupal is a PHP/Mysql project (with a choice of alternative database engines available), which makes it easy to launch a Drupal project on many different platforms, including most standard web hosting plans. Since PHP is such a widely used language, there is a large supply of potential consultants and providers.

• Scalability. Drupal is a tried and tested platform for running large scale websites that attract a lot of traffic. The built-in caching system works at several levels and ensures that Drupal's flexibility does not inhibit the performance. For complex web applications, there are several ways of giving the application some extra optimization on the hosting side.

• Maturity. The first incarnation of Drupal was created as early as the late nineties and it has grown with dignity since then. A long collaborative development process has made it a stable project, while allowing it to adjust and incorporate the best of all emerging web technologies and standards.

• Security. All software have potential flaws and security holes waiting to be discovered. Drupal has an active and well functioning security team who reacts quickly and fixes security holes as soon as they are discovered. The open nature of the project guarantees that this type of problems are acknowledged and fixed at an early stage.

Open and free

Drupal is an open source project, which means that no specific company or individual owns the code. Instead, the system is developed and maintained by a community of developers with the common interest of providing a flexible system which they can use for building web solutions. SthlmConnection plays a small part in this community by contributing code, documentation, translations and help in support forums.

Being an open source project, Drupal is completely free of cost, as opposed to its commercial competitors who are based on licensing systems that involve continuos costs for the client. Open source also means that the client is not in the hands of one specific provider and there is a vast amount of support available from the global community and from professional service providers.

In conclusion…

There are many different solutions for web publishing, but considering all the advantages we have a hard time finding a reason for not using Drupal. Like many others, SthlmConnection has chosen to work with Drupal and we hope that you will too!

We are happy to support the project by being an active part of the community and a member of the Drupal Association.