Drupal Tutorial
Introduction to Drupal Tutorial
Drupal is the popular and leading Content Management System CMS on the internet to build modern websites and to create all their sorts- from personal ones to big corporate portals. This CMS is built on PHP based environment and carried out under GNU, i.e., General Public License so that everyone can download and can share with others.
History of Drupal
Drupal, Pronounced droo-puhl, is a name derives from the English pronunciation of a Dutch word druppel, means for drop. In January 2001, Dries Buytaert developed Drupal core as the standard release of Drupal containing basic features just similar to CMS Content Management System that includes user account registration, system administration, menu management, RSS feeds, taxonomy, and page layout customization.What is Content Management System?
A Content Management System is a software used to manage the creation, modification, and publication of the digital content, supporting a collaborative environment.Why Drupal?
Drupal is free and utterly open-source software for the content management written in PHP so that anyone can download, use, work on, and share it with others. It is the platform the United States, London, France, and more use to communicate with citizens; further, a framework media companies like BBC, NBC, and MTV UK rely on to inform and entertain the world. Due to its standard features easy content authoring, reliable performance, excellent security, and core principles modularity and flexibility, it became popular and in more use than the other Content Management software like WordPress, and today it is known for content management framework. Using Drupal tools, you can build the versatile, structured content that dynamic web experiences need. You can create integrated digital frames. Nowadays, Drupal powers millions of websites such as WhiteHouse.gov, World Economic Forum, Stanford University, Examiner.com, etc. Lets’ go through its core principles and standard features.Core Principles of Drupal
- Flexibility
- Modularity
Features of Drupal
- Platform, Web Server and Database Independent: Drupal has its standard install configuration on Linux, Apache,and MySQL, but it can also run on other technology stacks: operating systems like Windows or Mac instead of Linux, web servers like Nginx or IIS instead of Apache, and PostgreSQL instead of MySql as a database.
- Easy Content Authoring: Drupal tools for content creation, workflow, and publication make it easy for content creators to do their jobs. It provides ease of use, mobile editing, in-place content creation, and granular tagging to make content useful and powerful for sites, mobile apps, and other applications.
- Greater functionality: Drupal is more functional in comparison to other modern content management systems like WordPress; that’s why developers prefer to use Drupal.
- Better customization possibilities: Drupal has better customization abilities with a large number of themes, plugins and configuration options by which developers can achieve their specific visions for their websites.
- Excellent Security: Drupal has corporate-level security and can generate detailed security reports.
Advantages of Drupal
- Being flexible, Drupal allows handling content types including video, text, blog, menu handling, and real-time statistics.
- It is free to download and a complete open-source Content Management Software so that anyone can modify and extend the platform.
- It provides easy to manage or create a blog or website.
- Using Drupal tools, you can make an attractive interface of your website.
- It provides a sufficient display quality to your website by which you will have an increment of many visitors on your site.
- It facilitates over 7000 plug-ins to boost your website, and as being open-source, you can create your plug-ins too.
Disadvantages of Drupal
- Usability: Drupal is not a user-friendly platform and has a high learning curve.
- Backward Compatibility: Drupal is not backward compatible with other software.
- Performance: Drupal is one stroke behind WordPress in terms of leading and scalability. It is slow to load because of the tools’ breadth and capabilities.
- Complex Interface: Drupal has an advanced and complex interface due to which it is not a very initiative. It is difficult to master because of Professional Construction Systems.
- Support: The community of Drupal developers is in less number than the other CMS like WordPress because of its advanced technical skills that finds its developers much harder and frustrating if to deal with an instant website issue.
3 Major Difference Between Drupal and WordPress CMS
- Drupal has less number of community developers than WordPress to fix bugs and problems at any instant website issue.
- Drupal is complicated in comparison with WordPress contains taxonomies, content types, blocks, views, and more led to a high learning curve.
- Generally, plugins in WordPress are easier to manage without any need of developer while usingDrupal; you need a developer to handle installation or updating of any module Drupal’s version of plugins.