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Loading ...As a leading content management system (next to openCMS, Joomla, Plone, …), I can only write a rave review on Drupal. A complex software application can only be evaluated through a real project, during which one often learns the limitations in quite a late stage of implementation. Not so with Drupal, where after half a dozen projects spread over the past 18 months, we’re still as excited as in the early days. I guess you could say I’ve become a Drupal evangelist in the meantime.
What’s nice about Drupal is its well engineered data structure. This sounds utterly boring, but makes the difference between heaven and hell for site administrators, moderators and users. It makes Drupal particularly suitable for content-rich sites. The brilliant idea is the decision to integrate all content streams. Everything is a ‘node’, whether it’s a blog story, page, eBook, image, weblink, download or whatever other content type you need (wine bottles, basketball games, TV programmes, customer visits, …). And all nodes can be tagged against a common and user-defined taxonomy.
Each taxonomy term produces an rss feed, which - if you post regularly on it, becomes a blog in its own right. For example, for a music website, you could offer feeds for groups, countries, types of music, …
Another very nice feature is the possibility to attach blocks to specific nodes or feeds. This is extremely helpful if you design pages for users to take specific actions - for example subscribing to an rss feed.
Drupal comes with many standard and additional modules, and is highly customisable. Starting a Drupal application from an empty screen can be a bit daunting, and it’s certainly not a matter of being up and running within a day. I guess that’s the price to pay for having the Rolls Royce of content management systems to support your web application.
Last but not least, Drupal comes with rich metrics, such as node count or download count. Top 10 lists for the site, or for a particular theme can be easily built. Links to other sites can be tracked as well. The tracker module shows which pages a user visits, or for a page, which users have visited it.
I could go on for a while like this. To see some Drupal applications, visit the Drupal site itself, or:
