At Hostdedi, we host several content management systems, including WordPress, ExpressionEngine, Craft CMS, and Drupal. You can build just about any site with any of these content management system, but each has strengths that make it a better choice for some projects than others. In this article, we will focus on Drupal and the projects to which Drupal is most suited.

Your Website Needs Flexible Content Management

Drupal is often thought of as a content management framework. It provides a set of tools and features that hosting clients can use to manage content, but Drupal doesn’t impose its opinion about how content should be organized. That’s ideal for large organizations with complex and heterogeneous content. Rather than fighting against a built-in content model, they can use Drupal to build a custom content model shaped by the requirements of their project.

Drupal’s fundamental content primitive is the node. All content is in a node (unless it’s a comment, in which case it’s attached to a node). A node can be an article, a page, a forum topic, or a custom content type. Content in nodes can be displayed on pages with endless flexibility.

Lots Of People Will Work On Your Site

Just as Drupal’s content model is supremely flexible, so are Drupal’s user management capabilities. Drupal user management is based on user roles, each of which can have different permissions. A user can be given multiple user roles that determine what they can do on the site. Drupal administrators can create as many user roles as they need.

Drupal’s user role and permissions model is ideal for sites with many writers, editors, and users.

You Need A Decoupled Content Management System

Drupal is architected to make building decoupled or “headless” content management platforms as easy as possible. Decoupling isn’t an afterthought in Drupal; it’s a core design principle. Drupal is an API-first content management system and that makes it much less challenging to build front-end applications and services that take advantage of Drupal as a back-end.

You Need Your Website To Scale

Drupal was built to support the largest and busiest websites. Its target users are enterprise organizations that receive millions of visitors a month, so it’s engineered to scale. Some of the largest publishing and promotional sites on the web are built on Drupal, including the Economist, OpenSource.com, Johnson & Johnson, Lady Gaga’s site, Al Jazeera, and many government sites.

Although Drupal is built to scale, web hosting plays a vital role in the performance, availability, and scalability of a Drupal site. To get the most out of Drupal’s scalability, choose a Drupal hosting platform that can grow with your business.

You Want To Build A Custom User Experience

Although Drupal includes a basic theme and it’s possible to install an off-the-peg theme, organizations that choose Drupal typically build a custom theme that reflects their branding and publication constraints. If your organization would prefer to use a premade theme, then WordPress may be a better choice. But if you value the ability to create a custom content model and complete control over the user experience, Drupal offers many advantages.

In summary, your website needs Drupal if it requires flexible content modeling and management, has many users with a multitude of roles, and you need a comprehensive array of tools to build a custom user experience.

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