Drupal services

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• features: you can do pretty much anything with it, including e-commerce, forums, blogs etc with seamless integration of membership throughout.

• flexibility: the whole system is based on a series of APIs (this is truer still starting with v6, as yet officially unavailable). The APIs give developers huge control, with database abstraction, form/menu/link processing, a comprehensive permissions system (GUI configured), and more.

• availability: an enormous set of contributed modules. The sheer number of available modules for Drupal is staggering. Knowing which ones to use for any given task requires a somewhat encyclopaedic knowledge. That said, this availability often results in a greatly reduced development time. I can’t count the number of times I’ve sat thinking “how do I do that…?” and someone else pipes up, “just use module X!” Plenty of smiles to be had from that!

• beauty: Drupal websites can be as pretty as you want them to be. The Theme system allows near-as-dammit absolute control of display of site elements. You can override all the default CSS, control all your HTML rendering down to an atomic level, override form displays (very powerful feature), provide your own variables to page templates etc. This is an amazing set of features which I have yet to see elsewhere at this level. The Drupal 6 version of this system is leaps ahead of this, with even more flexibility.

• traffic: core Drupal modules offer great control over content. With additional modules, any SEO expert would be pretty much stuck for a way to complain! Drupal sites fare very well in search engines anyway, but with some clever additions one can really boost search engine rankings. Having some SEO training myself, I know that there’s really little else you can do to improve your SEO that you can’t do with a well built Drupal site.

• support: a security team checks core code, modules and even contributed modules for loopholes, and issues warnings promptly. This is an important area to consider for future-proofing your site. On the main Drupal site (http://www.drupal.org), there are support forums, as well as a dedicated issues queue for each and every module. This means that there is a specific place to report bugs and check for known bugs, as well as centralising issues for each module, making developers lives much easier. All these things are held together by the fact that the Drupal community is almost unique. Of all the forums, websites etc that I have known and interacted with over the years, this one astounds me still. Drupal users and developers are for the most part working in more of a “family” environment than anything. This is exemplified on the IRC channels available (see below), where support is really quite impressive. I spend a lot of time helping there and am genuinely impressed with how helpful other people are.

All in all, I rate this system highly, not just for its features, but also for its intangible qualities. Other people who agree with me? IBM, Yahoo!, NASA, Warner, Greenpeace, Amnesty, Ecademy, and the list goes on.

Links:
IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net – #drupal, #drupal-support, #drupal-consultants
Sites: http://www.drupal.org , http://groups.drupal.org , http://planet.drupal.org
Modules: http://drupal.org/project/modules
IBM articles: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/osource/implement.html?S_TA...
Dev Book: http://www.drupalbook.com