When it comes to developing your website for any service or product, there are various options available to choose. You can choose to develop a site using custom coding or use an open source content management system (CMS). Custom coding requires efficient and highly skilled developers to build applications. The fastest and cost-effective solution is using an open source CMS for website development.
A CMS allows creating, updating and maintaining content on a website. It does not require any technical skills to edit content or update photo gallery or add product on an online store. A non-technical person can update content or change images on the website developed on an open source CMS. Some of the most popular CMS are Drupal, WordPress and Joomla.
Benefits of Drupal – A Leading Open Source CMS
Freedom and Flexibility
The main benefit take comes with open source is the freedom and flexibility to work. Drupal allows access to software database for all users. This allows users to make modifications to the software and add functionality they need.
You can also hire a developer or a specialized vendor with experience in Drupal development to customize your website and manage. Peer review and community production are used to build open source software in a decentralised and collaborative manner.
If you choose proprietary or closed source CMS to develop your website it make you stuck with the company as the system is owned and developed by the individuals where the code is private and cannot be modified.
In short, you own your website with an open source CMS, whereas you just rent it with a closed source CMS.
Cost Effective
Closed source CMSs all cost money to maintain. Closed source CMS follow a business model. They safeguard their product (in this case, the CMS) and provide a polished system to paying clients. It will not be true to say that website developed on CMS like Drupal come at no cost. The actual software can be downloaded for free to use. In terms of cost the open source CMS are cheap and popular.
Even if you have the CMS software to use and you are not planning to hire a dedicated developer or an agency for your site development, the cost of using the Drupal software can be broken down for templates, plugins and extensions that are required to be updated at regular intervals.
Regardless of these costs, Drupal solutions will almost always be less expensive compared to closed source CMS (with a few exceptions). If you choose an open source solution for site development, you will get a lot more value for your investment and efforts.
Developer and Community Support
There are millions of users across the globe using Drupal CMS for website development. Drupal also has a huge community of developers with deep knowledge of the system.
Bugs are quickly identified and fixed thanks to all of these people actively working and developing these platforms. There are also large supportive community forums available to get expertise and solutions.
There is free content and tutorials available over the internet to excess along with step by step guide videos on how to use open source CMS successfully.
Drupal community is one of the largest open source communities over 1,000,00 expert developers, trainers, designers, editors and sponsors working together.
Data Security
Drupal CMS platform have an advantage in terms of security because there are more eyes inspecting the code, and updates, including security patches, are automatic if they are web-based.
Some might argue that closed source CMS have more data security compared to open source. It is because the open source code is visible to anyone and it can be exploited to find vulnerabilities.
The open source is tested and reviewed by a large number of developers and that makes it more secure. Drupal is one of the safest open source CMS as the information is constantly transmitted and passwords are encrypted. The Drupal developer community also reviews the modules which make it one of the safest CMSs for website development.
Many big websites in the world are using open source CMS to run their websites. Many websites are developed using Drupal. Few of the websites to name are Tesla, University of Oxford, Harvard University and many others.
Conclusion
Many users might not know the strength of a Drupal CMS and overlook the system. Drupal CMS is reliable and flexible with improved security. The Drupal developer community is always ready to help fellow users and contribute back to the open source system. Drupal association member and Acquia partner like CIGNEX deliver top tier end-to-end Drupal development enterprise services and can also provide certified staffing resources for your projects.
