It would be strange if you haven't wondered yet how content has grabbed most of the attention for brands for the past few years. However, if you do realise the significance of content for marketing a brand, you will also acknowledge the relevance of a Content Management System (CMS) - An application that exists for the sustenance, creation, and modification of digital content. Also, a platform at which multiple users or members can collaboratively work.

The evolution of content on the world wide web rang the bell to mark the introduction of a Content Management System. The history of CMS started way back in 1989 with an internet-based hypertext system HTML. A turn of the tide was witnessed when Dynamic HTML Revolution was launched. It let the users identify and dynamically control parts of the document. With the upcoming versions, the management just got better with time with a few shortcomings. Then came the trend of website building sites providing pre-designed and customizable templates like Drupal in 2001, WordPress, and Squarespace in 2003, Weebly, which was followed later by Wix in 2006. These platforms made it possible for users with no knowledge of HTML, CSS, or coding to build low-cost websites with open source content management systems and frameworks. A framework that has a programming library of pre-written code, making it user-friendly.

Here, we will shine some light on Drupal and its latest version, i.e., Drupal 8. It is a content management software with easy content authoring, undeviating performance, excellent security, flexibility, and modularity. These adjectives very well describe Drupal’s CMS. Drupal organizes an international educational event called DrupalCon, where courses are provided to users at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels for an exceptional learning experience. Drupal, the world’s favorite content management system, just got finer with its very new version, Drupal 8.

Big brands are leveraging the exceptional capabilities that come with Drupal. Pinterest, Nokia, Encyclopedia.com, Columbia University are, to name a few. The highlight of the version is the D8 Acquia Lightning, an open-source distribution that helps build compelling content-rich digital experiences where drupal composers can create faster and better websites. Acquia Lightning helps the users choose the right meld of pre-selected Drupal modules, themes, and libraries.

For most enterprises, Acquia Lightning has brought a 30% savings in time spent on developing and configuring Drupal 8 projects. Nevertheless, let’s now come to the point and talk about the five characteristics that accentuate Drupal 8 from others. 

MULTILINGUAL CAPABILITIES

If your website is multilingual, it will take you global, which means your site will be viewed by a larger audience, which in turn has higher possibilities of bringing more substantial profits to your business.

Its multilingual capabilities are high for quickly building customized multilingual websites and web applications with the propulsive language-based display, and translation workflows. Adding to that, the exceptional corroboration for language handling helps to give the audience a localized digital experience, potentially saving time and money. 

Drupal 8 consists of 4 core modules that help in full translation of all the content on the site. Only a single node or entity is created, which is language-independent. Along with configuration and content translation workflows, Drupal also gives an interface language of administrators and content producers. They are hereby allowing businesses to speak and work in the language of their consumers or customers. It can be installed in more than 90+ languages and offers an effortless setup.

Nevertheless, once Drupal 8 is installed, language packages can be securely, automatically downloaded, and implemented without overarching the customized translations. 

SECURITY

It is said to be the most secure CMS and application framework compared to other prominent players in the CMS market. It holds resilience to critical internet vulnerabilities and aggressively validates and reacts to security problems.

Its default password encryption method and salt module repeatedly hashing account passwords when they are stored in the database let you enable secure access to the Drupal site. It is also capable of backing up the implementation of strong password policies, session limits, single sign-on systems, and industry-standard authentication practices.

Drupal provides a standard, easy to use, and secure way of adding forms to Drupal website: through Form API or FAPI for short. It also ensures data validation preventing CSRF, XSS, and other fraudulent data entry.

Drupal offers granular and intuitive user access control to give administrators complete control over who gets to see and who can modify parts of a site. It functions on a system supported by user roles that are retractable and access permission from the administrator who creates user roles that can be specific and at times, limited.

Drupal limits the number of invalid login attempts made from a single IP address and then blocks the account to prevent brute-force-attacks. For upscale security applications, Drupal can also be configured for firm database encryption. 

Its multi-faceted cache structure provides three key functions cache_get(), cache_set(), and cache_clear_all() which support in alleviating Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Drupal includes traits and functionalities that address all of the Open Web Application Security Project’s top ten security risks: broken authentication, sensitive data exposure, broken access control, and XML External Entities (XXE), Security misconfigurations, Insufficient logging and monitoring, etc.

No wonder, Drupal is the best CMS for some of the world’s highest traffic websites and when we talk about security.

CONTENT-AS-A-SERVICE

Drupal’s Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) solution lets you deliver long-term content by decoupling the back and front ends wherever useful. Drupal’s presentation-neutral content and RESTful API and by leveraging tools like Angular, Ember, Backbone, and more help front developers build better experiences. Incorporation of content from third-party content to Drupal by curation, aggregation, or syndication is possible. Also, due to Drupal’s Content-as-a-Service capability, content is easily absorbed by other applications and websites as per choice.

Drupal’s content-as-a-service approach provides content flexibility, along with delivering an ultimate digital experience.

SEO-FRIENDLY

The online market is very competitive for businesses nowadays. It becomes difficult for companies to rank a high position on Google’s search engine. All thanks to Drupal’s SEO-friendly CMS, that bears plenty of built-in and add-on modules for SEO that makes your great business website be better found on search engines determining profitability for your business. If at all, its modules also help with meta tags, keyword optimization, site mapping, broken link fixing, SEO friendly URLs, and host of other advantages making search engines inclined towards Drupal-powered websites. Drupal’s classified system promotes you to use more relevant keywords in your content so that you’re found by your customers and the future ones easily.

FLEXIBILITY

Drupal 8 is the most flexible version of all. With content creation and architecture, flexibility is immense. It provides a content construction kit (CCK), which gives the user full control over the content, meaning about the wheres and hows of the content display. This provides the user the comfort to manage Drupal and its versatile functions and permission sets.

Its enormous depository of user-contributed modules offers various functionalities. This helps to increase its social media outreach, which helps a lot of government organizations and businesses.

Getting to another context, Drupal is used by custom drupal web development companies. Unlike Wordpress development, Drupal 8 provides plugins that are well known as free modules, offer a range of functions, and can manage large amounts of content as well as users.

There comes flexibility in data manipulation i.e. adding functionality and changing data in Drupal depending upon the team, skillset, and experience. 

Drupal is designed to be the perfect content management solution provider for technical users and even the non-technical ones who need both simplicity and flexibility. Drupal can be called a content management system and a content management framework - one system that holds the strengths of both, without their flaws.

Evon, one of the company who provides drupal web development in India, has an expert team of Drupal developers, designers, and strategists. The complete Drupal web development team focuses on building custom solutions for clients by analyzing and understanding their ideas and core values to develop an effective strategy best suited for their business objectives. Evon believes in Implementing the latest trends and technology to take businesses to a whole new level with the employment of upcoming trends and versions.