Drupal: Powering Causes and the Web

In this ever-evolving digital publishing landscape, choosing the right content management system has a significant impact on an organization’s online presence, effectiveness in delivering the message, and its overall agility. Among this myriad of CMS and technology options available, it can be overwhelming to pick the right CMS.

Drupal stands out for its robustness, flexibility, modularity, performance, and scalability. Since its inception in 2001, it has powered millions of websites on the web, and many prominent agencies have chosen Drupal recognizing its potential and return on their mission.

Drupal has evolved through numerous versions, each bringing more features, better performance, and enhanced security. One of the key strengths of Drupal is its community, with thousands of active contributors and a vibrant ecosystem of designers, developers, and strategists all focusing on ensuring that Drupal remains at the forefront of digital publishing and corporate solutions.

Furthermore, Drupal allows for extensive customization to be tailored to each organization's needs whether it's a complex data structure, multilingual platform, or an intricate internal workflow, Drupal can handle it all, making it very versatile, diverse, and agile.

The Evolution

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Drupal’s journey began with its creator, Dries Buytaert who released Drupal 1.0 back in 2000 as a seed for an open source revolution for the web. Drupal’s backend has undergone significant evolution, starting from its early procedural PHP code which was effective but limited in terms of scalability and maintainability, leading the way to the adoption of OOP in Drupal 7, and to the fundamental upgrade to incorporate Symphony components in Drupal 8. This integration brought modern best practices such as dependency injection, routing, and templating to Drupal’s backend. Symphony also allowed better integration with third-party libraries and frameworks, paving the way to a modern CMS that is more robust and in line with the industry standards.

Versatility and Agility

Drupal’s architecture allows for streamlined production of a wide variety of websites, ranging from personal blogs to large enterprise applications, it is very well suited and equipped to be a perfect choice for corporate websites where complex features might be needed such as multi-language support, user authentication, and content management.

E-commerce platforms can benefit from product catalog features, shopping carts, and payment gateways. Government and Nonprofit websites benefit from accessibility compliancy and robust security, while educational, publishing, and media websites utilize their ability to handle large multimedia files, large content volume, and editorial workflows.

Prominent Drupal Websites

We took a look at the most prominent websites powered by Drupal, showing the trust those major organizations have put into Drupal to deliver their mission.

1. Tesla
2. Oxford University
3. UNICEF
4. Pfizer
5. Australian Government
6. Mediacorp
7. The Emmy Awards
8. Doctors Without Borders (MSF)
9. NBC Universal
10. City of Los Angeles
11. Pega Community
12. University of Colorado
13. Paramount
14. Columbia University

Final thoughts

One of Drupal's underrated features is packaged distribution, a process designed to accelerate the building and managing of websites, we at Vardot built our own Varbase on top of Drupal. it provides a solid foundation for building a wide range of websites from small business sites to large enterprise portals.

Some key features of Varbase:

• Ready-to-use Features: Varbase includes a variety of prebuilt functionality such as advanced content editing tools, media managers, SEO tools, and more.
• Responsive Design: Varbase relies on VarTheme, an out-of-the-box starter theme to ensure every website looks great and functional on any device.
• Scalability: Varbase is built to scale, it can handle small blogs as efficiently as large enterprise websites.
• Security: Varbase includes security features and best practices to help protect websites from vulnerabilities or attacks.
• Quick customizations: While Varbase comes with many preconfigured features, it is also designed to be highly customizable to tailor for any platform needs.

Varbase aimed to simplify the process of building and managing websites with ease, making it a popular choice for developers looking to create scalable and feature-rich websites, and currently we are expecting a new major update, stay tuned, stay agile, stay versatile.