Drupal Content Management
About Drupal CMF/CMS
- Drupal is free and open source software (FOSS). FOSS options avoid vendor “lock-in” and represent development efforts that are driven by user/community needs, not vendor objectives. Canadian and European guidelines direct Departments and Agencies to consider FOSS.
- Drupal is a stable, mature and robust WCMS, as confirmed from neutral sources in the book "Open Source for the Enterprise: Managing Risks - Reaping Rewards", (see book review.) When evaluated in a “vendor matrix,” FOSS systems should be evaluated by size of the total development & support community (vs. a vendor’s SBU employee base). Drupal compares highly favorably to commercial small- and medium-business WCMS systems.
- Drupal only requires PHP and MySQL on the server to run. PHP and MySQL are often authorized on governmental/corporate intranets and internet servers due to their well-understood, reliable platforms. This means that you can avoid a lengthy procurement process and trust the software base/infrastructure.
- Drupal can power sites that are "Common Look & Feel" (CLF). All that is needed is to develop a Drupal CLF Theme and follow IA guidelines.
- Drupal can power sites that are fully multilingual, hence, bilingual - for interface and content.
- Drupal can support multi-sites. That means that with one installation of Drupal, you can maintain many different sites, even with different domain names, on the same server/codebase, saving hardware and support costs.
- Drupal is fully Web 2.0 enabled, that is, aligned with major trends and technologies worldwide, and incorporates (if and only if these features are "turned on") blogs, free tagging (folksonomies), wikis, syndication, forums, commenting, aggregation, etc...
- Drupal also supports traditional methods of organizing information, such as "categories" that can be assigned to content according to a centrally defined taxonomy.
- Drupal supports custom content types. For example, if you were to build a registry of applications in use in any given Department or Agency, "application" could be defined as a content type and you could further define what kind of information you want to track for each application.
- Drupal supports custom roles and permissions. You can define, for example, an "Administrator" role, "Project Lead" role, and as any roles as you need to differentiate between what some users can and cannot do.
- Drupal has a modular architecture. You only add / select / enable the modules you want / need—a lightweight, on-demand framework.
Adapted from “Why Drupal would make sense…”
