subject: Professional Website Developers Choose Drupal Open Source Cms For Sophisticated Websites [print this page] Building a website requires the skills of website designers and website developers.
A client may have a concept already, designed by a graphic designer to cover all their marketing materials and keep them consistent with the corporate image so that their brand and logo become instantly recognisable.
The website designer will incorporate this into the look and feel of the website and it is the job of the developer to then build the structure, the pages and functionality needed to make it all work, also known as the content management system.
A website can be custom-built from the visual design using the developers coding skills but this can be a lengthy process and therefore costly for clients in terms of both time and money.
The availability of free to use open source software for content management systems has made it possible for software developers to keep the costs of building websites for their clients at an affordable level and to speed up the process.
The three main ones are WordPress, Joomla! And Drupal, and there is much debate among developers about the merits of each. All of them offer a wide range of templates that can be customised together with all the additional functions such as blogs, social media options and e-commerce payment pages that a business website may need.
However, the general consensus seems to be that although Drupal can take longer to learn, it is the preferred choice for certain types of complex professional websites.
Although there is much continued debate in developer forums on the internet Drupal seems to be considered the best open source CMS for experienced users and for building sophisticated business websites.
Some developers say they particularly like its customizable modules, which make it a particularly useful platform for building sophisticated web applications
Drupal was developed by Belgian Dries Buytaert between 1998 and 1999 and launched in 2000. As interest grew along with requests for more modules he made it open source in 2001and gradually a community of contributors grew.
It has been successfully used for government and educational websites as well as corporate and e-commerce solutions among many others and has been particularly useful for building a collection of social networking applications around websites. For an organisation that needs a website that is large and enterprise level, with integration with third-party systems and also need to have robust security, Drupal seems to be the developers choice.
