Artificial Intelligence

Top 5 Reasons to Choose Drupal as your CMS.

We get a lot of questions about what makes Drupal a good decision as a content management system. Here are the top 5 reasons, in order of importance:


We get a lot of questions about what makes Drupal a good decision as a content management system. Here are the top 5 reasons, in order of importance:

  1. Flexibility
  2. Good Governance
  3. Contributed Code
  4. Large Vendor Pool
  5. Scalability

1. Flexibility

The Drupal admin is one of the most highly configurable CMSs available. It allows for a variety of workflows and user & role based permissions, potentially down to a field level (not just pages). Versioning and tiered approval are all possible. More importantly Drupal provides (hands-down) the most configurable administrative area around. Any part of the admin can be tailored and reworked to fit a company's needs. This is not a super easy process, but it is a very important feature of Drupal, since administrators are arguably the most important people in the CMS ecosystem.

2. Good Governance

Drupal governance is community based, but is far from informal. Each version of Drupal has an appointed lead and there are well defined teams for managing the many facets of it. Dylan Tack (our Lead Drupal Architect) is actually a member of the Drupal security team. Additionally, every line of code that is added into the core of Drupal is vetted and verified by one of three people: Drupal founder Dries Buyaert (@dries), Angie Byron (@webchick) or Gábor Hojtsy (@gaborhojtsy). The value of this continuing involvement and curation cannot be understated.

3. Contributed Code

This one has a grain of truth, but Contributed code (as it's referred too) often benefits from hundreds of hours of quality assurance and testing - it also means you don't have to pay to build it. One of the values brought by a qualified Drupal consultancy is the encyclopedic knowledge of what modules are good to use - and what aren't.

4. Large Vendor Pool

This one an important one for people hiring an outside vendor. Drupal is not a closed-source proprietary system and there are literally thousands of Drupal developers. I would place Metal Toad Media among the top 8 Drupal consultancies, and here are some of our peers:

  • Acquia
  • Lullabot
  • Chapter Three
  • Development Seed
  • Four Kitchens
  • Palantir
  • Tree House Agency

And even within the more traditional Agency world, companies are offering Drupal services. There are literally dozens in Portland alone.

5. Scalability

Whitehouse.gov (a Drupal site) has served a peak of 2.5 million unique visitors in a single month (that's visitors, not page views). At Metal Toad Media, we have personally handled spikes of almost 2 million pages views in a day, on a Drupal site (emmys.com). At it's peak, the spike was equivilent to ~8 million page views in a day. This site was backed by a few servers and a CDN and that's pretty neat.

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