What issue bothers you the most while figuring out to launch your own web-project? No doubt that is selection of development platform. An architectural decision you finally make will affect every aspect - its echo you will hear during your website life-cycle over and over again. So what to choose if your idea is to create something more complex and interesting than a promo site or a simple blog without any advanced features? Drupal content management framework is what we recommend (yes, that is exactly a framework using which you can build not only websites but whole content management systems). Are you looking for reasonable arguments? After years of practice and implementation of various projects answers seem obvious to us and we would like to share them with you:
1) High development pace, low starting budget price
Using the most common terms Drupal is a completed web-site itself. It should be just tuned and set up according to your needs and technical specifications. How to do it? How to add the functionality that is absent in out of the box solution? Thousands of modules implementing different features are at your disposal. They make development process of first project stages much faster and less time-consuming if comparing to manual coding process. Therefore project starting budget price descends as all the basic functionality is already at hand.
2) Flexibility in relations between customer and contractor
Human relationship is a complicated thing at all levels, isn’t it? Family, love, friendship, business - all these spheres sometimes have unpleasant nuances and ties have to be broken-off.. The peculiarity of custom development is that the process of handing project (code, data base, etc.) is extremely painful. Have you hear about the stereotype that there is no worse thing for any developer than to deal with another developer’s code? Than you can visit any IT forum and make sure that is not a stereotype. What is the difference with Drupal? If the previous team have made everything in an appropriate way, by Drupal standards, than it will take not much time for another team to delve into current situation and take over the project.
3) Site management is plain and clear
Developers and usability interface experts are different professions. You are really lucky if you manage to find a contractor who is good at both fields. But much more often developers complicate management interface without taking into consideration that it will be used by users who are not IT specialists. Drupal in its turn provides both clear interface and management tools out of the box.
4) System security
Sometimes custom website developers may not check its security: errors can be uncovered very slowly, in the worst cases it can be even too late. Drupal is supported by more than 20.000 developers from all over the world. There is a security-team whose mission is to constantly examine safety of both system core itself and the most popular modules. Thus Drupal-developer will be immediately warned with a system message if any vulnerability is detected. Everybody knows lots of examples of custom sites or servers hackings. Do you know at least one case of Drupal hacking? That’s what we are talking about)