7 Reasons We Work with Drupal (instead of WordPress) for Websites

Recently many clients and colleagues have asked why we only work with Drupal. The dilemma? Drupal seems too complicated for small brochure-style websites, and arguably you can spin up a WordPress site in a matter of hours. While true, we have at least seven (7) reasons why Drupal is a better fit for our clients. Now, I’m not anti-WordPress. Actually, I’ve seen some great sites built on it, and I really appreciate how easy it is for people to use.

7 reasons why xTuple uses Drupal

1. Content Types — The power of Drupal is in the content types and views. With these two tools, we are able to build easy-to-use forms that our clients can simply fill out, and the system will aggregate this information easily, in all the required places. For instance, if a user wants to add an event to their site, they simply fill out a form, which includes fields for the title, brief description, full description, time, date, location, duration, and those all-important calls-to-action (CTAs). Once they click ‘Submit,’ the system puts all the pieces in the right place, including a teaser on the homepage, a brief introduction on the calendar, and a full description on the ‘Events’ page. This same concept can be used for any type of content you want to apply to the website. Staff member profiles, products, news items, teasers, internal ads, etc.

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2. Flexibility — Drupal is an amazingly flexible platform. Our developers are able to mold and shape the system into what our clients need it to be. The system is built to be configured to suit your needs, today and tomorrow. 



3. Security — The U.S. government embraced Drupal as their content management system (CMS) of choice, using the platform to build thousands of agency sites on national and local levels. Read more about U.S. government use of Drupal here.

4. Scalability — Drupal is built to scale. It’s a community-supported, open source platform ready for all of your new ideas. There are literally tens of thousands of modules available on Drupal.org that will power-up your website with new features. Additionally, Drupal handles sites that will continue to grow over time. The best example is Examiner.com, which has millions of pages of content, and it just keeps growing, and growing, and growing...



5. Robustness — The Drupal platform is very strong. It can handle small Mom-and-Pop marketing brochure websites, and it can handle sites like Grammy.com, which withstood millions of users pinging the site within a two hour period of time…all without a glitch. This is reassurance that no matter the size of our clients’ project, their system will not crash and leave you scrambling to get back online.



6. Open Source Community — The Drupal community is massive and very active. Of all the technology communities with which I’ve interacted, not one matches the Drupal community. Everyone is focused around the act of sharing and helping their fellow Drupal users grow. Rarely do you stumble across someone that isn’t willing to share or educate. And ninety percent of the time the answer to one of your questions (challenges) is just a Google search away. This helps shorten development time so that we can get our client’s websites up and running quickly even if we come across a challenge. [CLICK on image below for a larger view]

7. More of a framework — The main reason we love Drupal? We can use it as a flexible framework, rather than just a CMS. In our experience, Drupal offers a solid foundation of solutions that the majority of websites or Web systems require, and we can build on top of that to create any application that a client might request. Additionally, we are confident that once the system is built in Drupal, not only can we bolt on new features in the future, there is a large community of users out there that can pick up where we left off.

Those are just seven of the many reasons why we use Drupal over other platforms, but really the list goes on.

I’m curious as to what others think about Drupal, or other website-building platforms? What have been your experiences? What has developed a strong separator for you?