Drupal is a popular free and open-source content management system that can be customised. There are more than one million websites powered by it, including the websites of major organisations such as the World Economic Forum and Stanford University.
Drupal can be used to power online magazines (such as Examiner) or more corporate-style websites. Because it is released under the GPL, it can be modified to add new features or change how existing elements of the platform work. Users share their updates freely, and there is a large community surrounding the CMS.
Social By Design.Drupal is a multi-user social platform by design. The platform supports user levels out of the box, so you can offer different experiences to anonymous and logged-in users. Access-control levels allow you to restrict access to certain site features and certain content areas. There is no need to install third-party modules to enable such features.
Stable and Scalable.Drupal can be used on any size of website, from a membership club website to the corporate homepage of a multinational company. There are many websites powered by it online that are already handling 20,000 or more requests per second. If your server struggles to cope with the popularity of your website, you can take advantage of Drupal's free optimisation tools to identify, and fix, the problem.
The architecture of Drupal is designed to be easy to extend and build upon. Your in-house development team can modify Drupal's source code, or create modular extensions that add new features to the platform. If you do not have a development team in-house, you can hire experts from within the Drupal community, or use one of the many freely available modules to improve your website.
Security Issues.Any device that is connected to the internet is vulnerable to attack, and open source CMS systems are a particular target for hackers. Insecure scripts can pose a serious problem for any business. The reliance on 3rd party scripts presents an issue as Drupal also requires modules to be used to make it SEO friendly. There are also speed issues on larger sites and there was a known high risk security threat in 2014 which effected the whole platform.
The benefits of the system have to be weighed up with the issues above by any serious business considering using Drupal as its main CMS platform.
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