Is Drupal Right For You?

Drupal is a hugely popular framework for building websites that allows users to manage their own content.

Some of the world’s biggest websites use it. Including many in the public and not-for-profit sectors who favour it because it’s open source – which means there are no license fees.

And there’s a community of tens of thousands of developers working on it, including many in South Africa.

But is it right for you?

Over the years it’s come in for criticism for being unwieldy. For being tough to use and tough to support.

That’s fair criticism because Drupal was created for heavy lifting work. For websites that have complex rules. For organisations like the BBC, the Economist, General Electric and Pfizer. Businesses that need a system that’ll handle their organisational challenges and have the resources to use it to best effect.

Drupal’s complexity means that if your needs are simple – say you’re merely looking for a brochure-ware site – using it would be rather like putting a novice driver in a high performance sports car. You’d probably be better off learning to drive in a Polo. Or using WordPress.

But if, like the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the African Union, Tiger Brands and the myriad of South African and international organisations who’ve contracted Rogerwilco to build them a platform that’s capable of doing amazing things, Drupal’s probably the pick for you.

There’s a huge array of pre-configured modules – over 25 000 at the last count. That means a Drupal platform can scale rapidly as organisational needs change.

And its latest release, Drupal 8 has a host of new features making content editing easier, delivering seamless integrations with 3^rd party platforms and enhancing security.

In short, it’s a truly enterprise platform.

It’s the only open source framework to have made it into Gartner’s Magic Quadrant of web content management systems.

And, even if the message has been a little slow to reach South African shores, that’s why it’s being specified as standard by some of the world’s biggest enterprises.

So, if you’ve got a complex business challenge that you’re looking to solve with an engineered web platform, Drupal should be on your list. And as South Africa’s largest and most experienced Drupal studio, Rogerwilco’s your natural partner. Look into our Drupal development offerings for your site or see how we can assist with your Drupal 9 upgrade.