What Does Drupal Have To Offer?

Drupal is an open source content management software used to make websites and applications. The license used for distribution is under the terms of GNU (General Public Licensing), which means there are no licensing fees. In simpler terms, it is a free-for-all software that is downloadable, usable and customizable. Anyone can create and share code on Drupal. This has made it possible for over 1 Million developers to contribute to Drupal in their own way.

Drupal offers easy content authoring, excellent security, reliable performance, creative modulations and scalable module expansions. It focuses on creating versatile, structured and lively web pages or applications. The flexibility and modularity make it easy to create something that is more personalized and to share it with the world to use. The themes help customize content presentation and improve the user's web experience. It also offers packaged Drupal bundles that help mix and match components to create websites that are suited to the client requirements.

Now that we understand what it means when we say Drupal is a free and open source software, let’s discuss what are the features that Drupal offers.

Features of Drupal

While Drupal is flexible and modular, below are the features that allow the site visitors to have dynamic web experiences.

Security

Being an open source software, Drupal accepts scrutiny and input from developers around the globe. This helps them improve and update their software more frequently. The internet is a space that makes security a very crucial concern. To ensure that the security is not compromised Drupal has a team of experts dedicated to security. They use strong coding standards and a strict code review process to fix security bugs, identify and reduce potential internet vulnerabilities.

Drupal offers user access control, safe information sharing, database encryption and mitigation of DoS (Denial of service) attacks. It also helps prevent the entry of malicious data. This makes it easier for mission-critical sites to check their security against the strict and high security standards. It is beneficial for banking, healthcare, government and public administrative sectors to create a secure site.

Performance and Scaling

The Internet has now become the go-to place for all the questions making it easier to grab the attention of the audience and increase the traffic on websites. The faster a website loads the more traffic it will get. The higher the traffic the higher is the revenue generation. Keeping this in mind, Drupal helps cope with spikes in traffic and retain the audiences. The built-in features with a modern Content Delivery Network (CDN) perform well when under the pressure of load-balancing, advanced caching and supercharged databases.

Drupal’s scalability allows consistent performance over multiple devices including mobile phones that need to render quickly and effectively. It offers uptime without the need for server outages, over a million checks to check for potential problems and routes technology to scale across server clusters.

Multilingual

With the growing Internet everything has become globally accessible, from food to clothes anything can be delivered from one part of the World to another. To smoothen the process of communication globally, it is important to ensure that the language is local. This provides a direct connection to the people.

Drupal offers automated language translation in over 100 languages. It translates everything on the website including menus, taxonomy, particular fields, blocks, contact forms and comments. It allows preferred language detection using IP address, URL, browser setting and more. It also supports languages that can be read from right-to-left like Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi.

Accessibility

When we talk about a global audience we need to be inclusive of everyone. Everyone includes people with special requirements. Imagine being able to magnify the text because someone has forgotten or lost their specs. This makes it easier for everyone to read and interact with any form of content. Drupal understands that not everyone has the same needs and allows the modification of website visibility based on their requirements. It offers readable and structured metadata, and editorial options that make content created accessible to everyone.

Marketing Automation

Marketing has become an integral part of a company’s day to day functions. Making it important to push the right content to the right audience at the right time. This can prove to be difficult if one has to do everything from sending out emails to analyzing the audience manually. Drupal provides consolidated and streamlined automated tasks. It uses modules and tools to help understand the audience and convert potential leads.

You can use Drupal to set out marketing automation rules like when should an abandoned cart email be sent or when should a particular discount email be sent. It includes features like real-time sales alert, streamlined workflows, bulk data management, advanced email reporting, tracking of site traffic and audience conversion rate and more.

Content Authoring

Drupal was specifically built for web publishing, it helps create a diverse digital ecosystem that includes everything from marketing to content management. It allows the integration of multiple tools like CRM, email marketing, marketing automation and analytics. It is used to offer consistent content through the websites, mobile apps and social media. It also offers dynamic digital and shopping experience. In short Drupal can be used as a content repository that can be accessed via an API. It allows content creation for numerous users and monitoring of multiple campaigns in a single space.

Personalization

Drupal collects data like geolocation, device type, browser history, user clicks and behavior taxonomies to create a unique profile for every user. This makes it easier to offer the audience a more personalized experience reducing their time in search mode. It helps increase the Return on Investment (ROI) through target marketing. It also enables tracking and reporting with multivariate reporting.

Content-as-a-Service (CaaS)

Drupal with it’s CaaS functionality offers support to full-scale digital content lifecycle management. It allows you to create reusable content, display content in multiple layouts, scale regardless of content size, achieve immediate and optimal responses and provide a customized view for content authors and editors. Customers have become more volatile and keep moving from one content to the other, you can now create content independent of the website and manage it in a single location reducing the need to move between software.

These scalable features make Drupal a perfect choice as it has no limitations to the changes one can make. These features not only benefit a particular sector, they can be used for any and every sector like retail, FinTech, sports, travel, e-commerce and more. The important point to remember when deciding to build your website or application using any of these features is the goal. If the reason for creating a website is clear then the process will be easier. Each of these features can be expanded and customized because of it’s open source specialty. You can choose and decide which of these is more suitable for you. Which of these features have you used and customized?