Mon March 01, 2010
Websites, Content Management & Drupal CMS
In 1998 we produced and launched our first website for a large minerals exploration company. It spanned close to a hundred pages full of copy, financial forecasts and images. As this was more than 12 years ago and web technology was in its infancy, each page was manually created, manually linked to the rest of the site and then uploaded. Maintaining a large website of this type was time consuming and costly so in the ensuing years we looked at various alternatives from off the shelf web page editors to our own content management system but nothing seemed to satisfy our requirements list. We needed a website management “Platform” that was supported and maintained by an army of developers, testers and contributors who could anticipate the next big thing and meet it head on with excitement. Enter Drupal's open source content management system...
Drupal was just what we were looking for; a platform with literally thousands of modular plugins for everything from customer relations, to eCommerce, music, video syndication, blogs, forums and everything in between. To top it off, if we can't see what we need in the available modules list, we can create our own custom modules that plug right into the framework.
The downside...
Because Drupal is a very large and well engineered piece of software, it has an enormous learning curve but then again, the payoff is well worth the effort. Since we adopted Drupal as our platform of choice for developing our clients websites about four years ago (2005/06) the framework has evolved into an even more accomplished platform for building websites, tackling everything from search engine optimizing to contact management, to managing online communities.
We have already completed several new Drupal sites this year with more in the works. By the end of this year we expect to have completed up to a dozen sophisticated and unique, new fully content managed Drupal websites.