Drupal development

Drupal as a Digital Experience Platform

At its core, Drupal is a content management system (CMS), which means it gives you the tools to structure and manage your content. It also lets you build flexible content publishing workflows and all kinds of dynamic features around that content. For organizations looking to transform and expand their digital presence, Drupal also serves as the central component of your digital experience platform (DXP). This means you can integrate it with payment gateways, CRMs, analytics tools, social media, and marketing automation platforms.

Drupal is especially powerful for projects where you want to combine high-quality content with a wide range of features and marketing tools. There are many ways to prioritize content strategy when using Drupal as a DXP.

Why Drupal?

Most websites share a few common features: navigation menus and content lists, content pages with clean URLs, a header logo, a footer with contact info, the ability to search through content, and so on. At the same time, every website has unique components: custom information architecture, specific content sets, a distinctive design, and sometimes custom functionality.

Drupal excels at both standard features and custom solutions. It gives you all the common functionality a website needs while also being flexible enough to create a unique, customized experience. Some of Drupal’s biggest advantages include:

• Flexible, user-friendly content creation tools
• A “create once, publish anywhere” approach to content management
• Highly customizable features
• Powerful API-first architecture
• Thousands of freely available modules (add-on functionality)
• Constant innovation driven by a large, engaged community

To make this possible, Drupal comes with countless out-of-the-box features. The more you learn about how it works, the more you can leverage its full capabilities, such as:

• WYSIWYG authoring and editing tools for easy content search, design, editing, preview, archiving, publishing, and updates
• Layout Builder – a powerful no-code solution for building attractive pages using templated layouts and drag-and-drop content placement
• Customizable workflows and approvals, plus revision history to track and roll back changes
• Media support for local audio, video, images, files, and external sources like YouTube, Vimeo, or Twitter
• Media library for reusing or uploading media directly into the site
• Performance-optimized caching mechanisms
• Theming system for fully customized, responsive front-ends aligned with your brand and preferred frameworks
• Recommended contrib (community) modules for extending functionality
• User-friendly form builder for everything from simple contact forms to complex multi-step applications
• Content scheduling for timed publishing
• Customizable URLs and configurable metadata for each content item
• Robust search experiences, including integration with enterprise-grade search engines like Elasticsearch and Solr
• Migration system to import data into Drupal
• Multilingual content and UI
• Accessibility compliance (WCAG AA)

What is Drupal used for?

Now that you can answer the question “what is Drupal?”, you might be wondering: given its flexibility, what types of projects typically use it?
Thanks to all of these built-in features, Drupal is a top choice for large, complex websites. And because it’s open source, it’s especially popular among universities and colleges, government agencies, healthcare providers, and nonprofits.

The main reason so many large organizations choose Drupal is its flexibility. While most CMS platforms focus on specific use cases, Drupal is designed to handle virtually any scenario where digital content plays a role.

Drupal powers a wide range of digital experiences, including:

• Corporate and institutional websites – distributed publishing workflows, corporate branding
• Intranets – internal content, customized workflows for internal processes, internal content lists, single sign-on
• Online directories – advanced search interfaces, related content listings, integrations with third-party content
• Interactive websites – features for logged-in users, multi-step forms, personalized content, custom JavaScript for maps and visualizations, decoupled front-ends
• Marketing portals – landing pages optimized for SEO and UX, integrations with marketing automation, taxonomy and metadata management

Common Drupal Terminology

As you dive deeper into understanding how Drupal works, you’ll come across terms that may seem unfamiliar. Don’t worry—you’ll get used to them quickly. Here are some of the most common ones:

• Node – A piece of content. Each content type (e.g., blog post, event listing, landing page) has its own fields, and every node typically has a unique URL.
• Content type – A template for a specific kind of node.
• Taxonomy – Vocabularies and terms used to organize content (e.g., tags for blog posts).
• View – A list of content, ranging from a simple news list to a map or calendar.
• Module – A piece of code that adds functionality to a Drupal website.
• Theme – Defines the layout and design of the user interface.
• Block – A container for displaying something on a page (e.g., search form, logo, footer copyright).
• Permission – A task a user can perform (e.g., view content, post a comment, edit an event).
• Role – A type of user (e.g., author, editor, member).
• Drupal core – The out-of-the-box features and functionality Drupal provides.
• Contrib module – Add-on functionality developed and shared by the Drupal community.
• Custom module – Add-on functionality built in-house to meet specific project needs (e.g., a custom CRM integration).

Fun Facts About Drupal

• Drupal was created in 2001 by Dries Buytaert, making it one of the earliest open-source CMS platforms.
• The word Drupal comes from druppel, Dutch for “drop.” Dries originally tried to register dorp.org (“village” in Dutch), but misspelled it as druppel.org—and the name stuck.
• The Drupal logo is a stylized water drop. The community also uses the Druplicon, a cartoon-like drop adapted by local groups worldwide.
• The most recent version is Drupal 9, released in June 2020. Drupal 10 is scheduled for release in June 2022.
• As of February 2022, about 1.3 million people use Drupal, including developers, designers, content creators, and sponsors.
• Drupal is written in PHP, which powers nearly 80% of all websites. The latest version uses modern, object-oriented coding practices and the Symfony framework.
• More than 120,000 users contribute to the Drupal community, resulting in over 46,800 free modules and more than 1,000 commits per week.
• There are over 1 million Drupal-based websites.
• Drupal is one of the most popular CMS platforms in higher education. The larger the institution, the more likely it is to use Drupal—it’s the leading CMS among universities and colleges with over 6,400 students.