Of the open-source content management systems available today, the most widely accepted and popular ones are Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. But how will you choose the one suitable for you.
Wordpress is best suitable for you, if you require a simple and fast blog or easy to operate website which does not require much enhancements or modifications in the future. But if you are having or thinking of a small or medium sized business website which do not require future contingencies that are too intricate, Joomla is the best. And if you are planning to set up a enterprise class website that require more content oriented features like forum, blogs, news, analytics, product displays etc that requires large scale changes in near future, Drupal is the best open source CMS platform.
Remember the bad old days, when you used to run bunch of programs on your computer just to create a website or for doing simple webmastering tasks. Gone are those old ways which requires installing lot of expensive software on your own computer. With the evolution of CMS, you can just put the burden on to the website programmer and get relieved from all these technical hassles and difficulties.
In the early days, CMS’s were just employed by big-budget websites like amazon.com which was programmed mainly in C++ and run on commercial databases like oracle and the cost of setting up was in million dollors. But as time progressed, observers could notice a new kind of economy emerging as a result of open source.
Now open source CMS has evolved into a world class software platforms which is used to build simple websites to some of the biggest and sophisticated sites on the universe.
Choosing Drupal for your project
We all know that, one of the strengths of all open source community is flexibility, so that it can adapt to users needs with extreme efficiency. Drupal is the best example of this. The rapid rise of Drupal coincides with a movement that values thoughtful collaboration over aggressive competition.
In 2001 Drupal started as a content management system, but then it kept on evolving. With time, it become so flexible that people started thinking it as a framework rather than just an application for managing pages on a website. Thus Drupal is much more than a CMS. So to cut short, Drupal is a content management framework, which is basically a content management system with hooks to extend it.
Hence Drupal became a well known Content Management Framework written in PHP, which was widely used to create not only personal blogs but also professional websites. As an active member of Drupal community, we strongly believe that Drupal is a Content Management Framework for developers and Content Management System for non-programmers.
Now lets have a clear understanding of what a CMF is
A Content Management Framework is a system that make use of reusable components or custom- build software to manage web content by storing and organizing files and data. It shares features of both web application framework and content management system. For developers, CMF as a development tool is a software framework, that supports them to make customized web applications as well as dynamic websites, web services and web resources required for business applications.
So what makes a Content management Framework different from a Content Management System ?
In general, CMS is a system that allow you to manage your website content through a user friendly interface. A Content Management System will usually provide some tools to create a custom theme or template. But a CMF is more flexible than a CMS and provide some mechanism to extend its functionality to manage contents on a website. A CMS can be build on top of CMF, but a CMF has no direct relationship to a CMS. In short, a Content Management system is something that even a non developer can easily setup and use. Whereas a Content Management Framework, if in the hands of an expert can be used to make either something very simple or something very complicated.
Drupal as a CMF
Drupal was more considered as a CMF since it had built-in ability to grow according to the changing needs. It can be scaled to handle large number of traffic as well. Drupal also allows users to organize, publish and manage variety of content with ease. It maintains a vigilant security community, providing security release updates regularly to achieve maximum site security, which is one of the reasons even the U.S. Government and governments around the world use Drupal.
But the main challenge that a Drupal adopter have to face whether it be a new site owner or a fresh developer is, figuring out what is easy and what is hard to do with drupal.
So Drupal has evolved and is still growing as a Content Management Framework, from which you can build a CMS tailored specifically for your needs.
Contact us to learn more about how Valuebound can help your organization use Drupal framework for your next business idea or product.
