Ultimate Guide to Drupal Enterprise CMS

Introduction

What do Tesla, Oxford University, and The Economist have in common?

They all use Drupal enterprise to power their websites. Infact, several leading organizations, and non-profits like

  • Tesla
  • CVS Health
  • General Electric
  • World Wildlife Fund and many more
TESLA Website upgraded to Drupal 9
THE ECONOMIST Website using Drupal
OXFORD UNIVERSITY Website using Drupal

Founded in 2001, Drupal is the biggest open-source web content management system (CMS) used to build e-commerce websites and applications of all sizes for enterprises. Drupal development not only boosts user experience but also enhances website performance.

Drupal development is used by over 1,749,604 websites as of 2022. Hundreds of well-known organizations, including corporations, media and publishing firms, governments, non-profits, schools, and people, are among them. Drupal development is the #1 choice for open-source CMS for enterprise-level organizations.

Drupal’s cutting-edge features and functionality include:

  • Advanced Security: Secure and protects users from vulnerabilities
  • Multi-lingual Support: Allows seamless translations and multilingual support
  • Performance and Scaling: A scalable and performance oriented platform
  • Marketing Automation: Target your audience with tailored marketing automation strategies
  • Content Authoring: Create content — even from numerous users — in one place
  • Personalization: Use customer data to create a personalized experience
  • Open Source: Fully customizable according to your business goals
  • E-commerce: Managing your content, marketing, payment and fulfillment tools to help grow your e-commerce business
  • Accessibility: Accessible to the widest audience with a range of disabilities
  • Content as a Service (CaaS) or Headless CMS: Decouple your front-end and back-end to scale content
Photo Credits: Kinsta.com

Key Statistics:

  • 33 of Fortune 500 companies use Drupal
  • 56% of government websites are using Drupal because of advanced security
  • The Drupal community has 1.3 million members
  • Drupal is available in 100 languages
  • Drupal is downloaded more than 45 million times
  • Drupal market share is 4.6% of all CMS

Drupal development is a fully functional CMS that can be fully customized according to the company’s business goals. Drupal customization, design, development etc. can be achieved by hiring a professional Drupal development firm.

Photo Credits: Auxesis Infotech

“Dorp” is a Dutch word that means “village”. This signifies the small community that Buytaert and his classmates started. However, when Buytaert was typing the word, he misspelled it to “drop” and drop.org became live on the web.

The Drupal logo, known as druplicon, was designed by Steven Wittnes and Kristjan Jansen. The community started to evolved and also turned into a personal experimentation environment (with a focus on web technologies) due to discussions and innovative ideas from the audience.

2001: Drupal 1.0, which began as a message board written by Dries Buytaert, became an open-source project. In the same year, new features were introduced in Drupal 2.0 and 3.0, improving core functionality.
2002: Drupal 4.0 was launched with the taxonomy module. Drupal 4.1 to 4.7 were released subsequently including the first e-commerce module (4.4) that featured a profile module, a theme template,customizable forms etc.
2003: Presidential candidate Howard Dean used Drupal for DeanSpace. This helped lead to a 300% increase in content activity on Drupal.org.
2004: CivicSpace Labs, a company with full-time employees started developing and distributing Drupal technology for the first time.
2007: In Drupal 5.0, developers made the administration area more customizable and better organized.
2008: Drupal 6.0 was launched and presented many improvements related to usability and performance. Over the next 4 years, Drupal went through 22 sub-releases. Also, the Drupal.org website hosted over 1.4 million downloads of Drupal software.
2011: Drupal 7.0 was launched with an entirely rewritten database layer and various security and usability changes.
2015: Developers launched Drupal 8.0, where they significantly improved the front end as well as the entity system and made the site administration experience simpler.
2020: With the launch of Drupal 9.0, some technical changes were implemented. A new version also made it easier to update websites built in Drupal 8.8 and 8.9.

We have listed the key features below that can help you create flexible, scalable and secure websites.

1. Advanced Security

Why choose Drupal development? Drupal enterprise benefits from the scrutiny, maintenance, and ongoing input of developers globally, as well as a dedicated staff team of security experts who work together to address and release security fixes on a regular basis. Drupal’s strict coding standards and community code review process prevent many security issues entirely.

Critical sites and applications prefer Drupal enterprise because it has been thoroughly tested to meet the most stringent security requirements. Banking, governments, public administration, and healthcare industriesare adopting Drupal at the fastest rate due to its security measures.

What Drupal’s security features include?

  • Database encryption & user access control
  • Security reports used to share information.
  • GitHub collaborates with auto-updates and core validation
  • Malicious data entry is prevented
  • Denial of Service (DoS) attack mitigation
  • Issues are patched before they can be exploited
Photo Credits: S3.amazonaws.com

2. Enhanced Multilingual Support

With Drupal’s automated language translation, you can reach out to a variety of audiences with localized content. Your messages and information can be customized to target geographic areas, audiences and languages instantly and seamlessly.

Drupal’s core modules enable full translation of all aspects of a site, including content types and their associated fields, menus, blocks, taxonomy, users, contact forms, and comments.

Drupal web development company can also detect a user’s preferred language based on their IP address, browser settings, URL, session, and other factors. Drupal enterprise also supports languages that use a right-to-left text direction like Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi.

How can multilingual feature benefit businesses globally?

  • Audience expansion
  • Better translation
  • workflows
  • Boost in SEO
  • Higher conversions

3. Performance and Scaling

Drupal enterprise is used by large enterprises that require multi-channel sites with custom content, such as Pfizer and weather.com, as well as sites that experience higher traffic, such as the GRAMMY Awards and the NBC Olympics.

When combined with a CDN provider, Drupal’s built-in performance features like load balancing, supercharged databases, and advanced caching work seamlessly towards no downtime. Drupal’s scalability ensures that content is delivered consistently across platforms including mobile, tablet, desktop etc.

Drupal enterprise ensures that:

  • There is uptime without server outages
  • They run many checks in a day for performance issues
  • Their technology dynamically scales across servers

4. Marketing Automation

Organizations can use digital integration to advance marketing communication across multiple channels. Tasks such as emails, social media and analyzing target audience and delivering the right content at the right time requires automation as it saves time, money and effort.

Drupal’s recent versions integrate seamlessly with automation platforms that can collect customer demographics and help convert potential leads using its modules and tools.

You can use modules to assign rules for automated marketing to these visitors. For example, sending an email offer in response to an abandoned cart, adding vissitors to a specific list, or using AI applications like a chat bot to deliver information.

Integrating marketing automation platforms with Drupal enterprise can help you with:

  • Alerts for sales in real time
  • Bulk data management
  • Streamlined workflows
  • Advanced email reports for target audience
  • Tracking website traffic, conversions and much more…

5. Content Authoring

With Web services support, Drupal functions as a content system that’s accessible through an API. The authoring experience in Drupal enterprise features in-line editing and better WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) that streamlines the content creation process.

How can your business benefit from Drupal’s content authoring?

  • Create content in one place even if it comes from multiple users.
  • Distribute content across multiple channels
  • Connect to all marketing tools
  • Your content is available to users on any device
  • In one place, you can keep track of your site’s content and campaigns
  • Customize, retarget, and personalize your content

6. Personalization

You can use Drupal enterprise to create a unique, personalized profile for each visitor based on geolocation, browser history, device type, and behavior taxonomies. Based on a user’s clicks and decisions at each data point, you can get a better picture of who they are and what they’re looking for.

With real-time behavioral profiles, you can display a targeted marketing message, case study etc. for your prospect to increase conversions. Drupal’s personalization feature has many benefits including:

  • Delivering a fully customized experience
  • Segmentation of visitors across all devices
  • Using A/B and multivariate testing to track and report
  • Increasing ROI by a targeted marketing

7. Open Source

Is Drupal open source? The term open source refers to software that has its source code made public. Users and developers are allowed to use and modify it under certain conditions. Drupal is highly customizable as compared to other CMS platforms. It provides many custom built options like designs, layouts, operations and modules.

Developers and designers can fully customize your Drupal enterprise according to your business goals. Drupal has more than 48,000 modules and allows you to implement additional features into your Drupal website like social media, CRM and SEO.

What makes open source technology so popular and beneficial?

  • A large community consisting of users, developers and administrators exist to assist one another
  • Because many developers and experts test it on a daily basis, the software is stable
  • The GNU Public License means the software is completely free to download, use, and modify.

8. E-commerce

One of the most comprehensive open-source CMSes available, Drupal, is the perfect fit for e-commerce businesses. With Drupal enterprise, you can manage your content, integrated marketing, payment, and fulfillment tools that will help in:

  • Growing your audience
  • Boosting sales & ROI
  • Optimizing website performance
  • Enhancing user experience

9. Accessibility

Drupal enterprise helps you reach a wide audience as it provides accessibility to special people with a range of disabilities. Websites like paralympic.ca, specialolympics.ca use Drupal. Some of the accessibility features included in Drupal 8 and the forthcoming Drupal 9 include:

  • Optimized Color Contrast Themes and Font Sizes
  • Alt Tag Defaults
  • Control Tab Order
  • Mobile Responsiveness
  • Aural Alerts

Following are the benefits of Drupal’s accessibility feature:

  • Screen readers can read structured meta data
  • Editorial controls to ensure that content is created in an accessible manner

10. Content as a Service (CaaS) or Headless CMS

Is Drupal a CMS? Drupalenterprise offers a preconfigured development environment that supports full-scale digital content lifecycle management with its multisite and Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) functionality, also known as headless or decoupled.

Drupal enterprise helps you in:

  • Creating content that can be reused
  • Displaying content in many layouts
  • Obtaining the highest level of responsiveness
  • Scaling regardless of size
  • Customizing views for content creators and editors and much more…

Drupal 7

Drupal 7 was released on January 5, 2011, with launch parties held in several locations. Following that, Drupal 5 maintenance was discontinued, with only Drupal 7 and Drupal 6 remaining.

With the release of Drupal 7, there were many new features and upgrades for both developers and users to make the most of this content management system. Drupal for Developers: Drupal 7 has greatly aided developers through improvements in themes, modules, multi-support, and so on.

Drupal 8

Drupal 8’s first release candidate (rc1) was revealed on October 7, 2015. Drupal 8 includes upgrades for both users and developers, such as a revamped user interface, in-place editing, and enhanced mobile support.

Also, key contributed modules such as Views, Date, and Entity Reference have been added and improved. A new object-oriented backend leveraging Symfony components has been introduced. In addition, configuration management has been revamped and multilingual support has been improved.

Drupal 9

Drupal 9 was launched on June 3, 2020, following the introduction of a new development approach in Drupal 8. Organizations that are currently utilizing Drupal 7 or Drupal 8 may want to migrate to Drupal 9 for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is security and support.

Drupal 8 community support stopped in November 2021 due to its reliance on Symfony 3, which also reached the end of life the same month. Drupal 7 community support has been extended until November 28, 2022.

The original release of Drupal 9 did not include any new features, but it did have a leaner, more secure system, support and easier-to-use APIs.

Baker-Electric

Based on Drupal 8, Baker-Electric provides electrical contracting services throughout Southern California. Baker Electric is able to provide quality and innovation with its redesigned Drupal enterprise.

With PROS Drupal development company, Baker-Electric created a custom made Solar Calculator that helped businesses and households to calculate how much they can save on their electricity bills.

Moreover, we integrated a custom plugin for employees to submit projects and get them approved by administrators, that way businesses save a lot of time and resources.

 

Tesla

An example of D
You’ve probably heard something about Tesla’s fleet of self-driving cars, Cybertrucks, incredibly fast and powerful electric Roadsters. With Drupal enterprise , Tesla enables multiple features and functionality to its customers that includes customized product and cart pages, intuitive UI/UX, etc

Based on Drupal 9, Tesla is one of the world’s most talked-about firms today, having pioneered the development of electric motors and sustainable energy.

A billion-dollar corporation’s website should be extremely sleek, professional, and highly successful at showcasing its products. The power of Drupal development was used to do this.

Drupal 10 will be a refined version of Drupal 9 and will be released in December 2022. What will be included in Drupal 10?

Key features that will be included in Drupal 10 are as follows:

  • Claro administration theme is replacing Seven
  • The default theme Olivero is replacing Bartikm
  • Layout builder and media functionality have been improved
  • Better decoupling of developer and site builder experiences for menu and URL handling
  • The release of CKEditor 5, which provides a better authoring experience and more modern editing capabilities
  • Some jQuery functions will be replaced by modern JavaScript components
  • New theme Starter kit tools for creating custom themes
  • Symfony 6 under the hood will replace Symfony 4) and PHP 8.1 will be released to keep the system secure

Vartheme BS4

Vartheme BS4 (soon to be Vartheme BS5) is a great theme for enterprises and SaaS businesses. It also has some really unique features, such as background films and photos, subjects and clusters, etc.

Vartheme is a free business theme that may be used to create your own unique business theme.

Barrio

Barrio is a Base Bootstrap 4/5 theme. It’s essentially a blank layout page that you can fill with Bootstrap CSS codes to make whatever Drupal 8 or Drupal 9 theme you like. Barrio has been used to build many themes, including Vartheme, and they all have one feature in common: great performance.

Barrio allows you to get creative and create your own unique Drupal theme look if you are familiar with coding and CSS.

Bootsrtap5

It is just a collection of organized files that define your website’s visual appearance. But it’s completely empty! As a result, even if you installed it on your website, you would just see an empty page as a design.

The X

The X theme, created by Drupal, is a simple, minimalist, and clean theme. The X theme is compatible with both Drupal 8 and Drupal 9. And, despite being owned by Dupar, it is not dependent on it or any other third party.

In other words, by adopting this theme, you take entire control over how it is used, and thus how it responds and performs. Drupal enterprise is used by at least 360 websites, and no problems have been reported so far. This means that the X basic theme is a good place to start.

Vani

Vani is a mobile-first theme that is clean, responsive, fast-loading, and uncomplicated. It’s not as simple as the previous ones, but it’s also not ready for professional use. However, it is easier to adapt and edit, even without CSS coding.
The theme is free and built with Bootstrap 4.

PROS is an award winning Drupal web design company. Our professionals have an experience of 20+ years in internet marketing, development, and design, SEO, social media marketing, and e-commerce.

PROS Drupal development consulting company has designed thousands of professional, creative, and corporate Drupal websites. We have a demonstrated track record of success in all business verticals, from small firms to large organizations. Our Drupal web design experts offer a high-performance development plan to help you build a powerful user experience.

In 2021, Clutch awarded us with one of the top web development companies and named PROS as Top Drupal Developer in San Diego!

PROS Drupal development company has designed and developed many complex Drupal enterprise websites including Baker-Electric. Get in touch with us today.

Large organizations and enterprises like eBay and The Economist with high volumes of traffic and need for heavy customization use Drupal. Drupal’s extensive flexibility and customization capabilities helps large organizations to enhance website performance, user experience and maximize ROI.

With Drupal enterprise, businesses can scale up by taking advantage of the powerful features that it has to offer. With advanced security, multilingual support, content authoring, personalization and much more, Drupal is the best open-source CMS platform.

Are you looking for a Drupal development agency or a Drupal web design agency? PROS is one of the best Drupal development companies in San Diego. Call us at 619.567.9322.

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