In the world of content management systems (CMS), there is no one solution for all. Choosing the right CMS is a very important step towards developing a website. This article provides the reasons why Drupal might be the CMS choice for you.
Drupal is an open-sourced CMS backed by a large community. It is one of the most popular CMS in the world of websites. It has a wide range of APIs that can be used. It also supports multilingual sites and responsive web pages. The security features of Drupal is one of the best in the world of CMS. In today’s world, the security of information and data on your website is as important as ever. Let us introduce some advantages of Drupal in detail.
Drupal is fast.
When a Drupal web page is viewed, the content does not need to be reloaded. The content to be browsed is quickly loaded from the temporary storage. Drupal can also temporarily store entities and loads JavaScript only when it is necessary. In the competitive environment in the world of websites, split-second differences might be the make or break factor of user buying products from your website or your competitors’ website.
Scalability.
An important issue to consider when building a professional website is the flexibility and scalability of the platform. Drupal is one of the most flexible and scalable CMS for building any type of website. The modular approach in Drupal gives the CMS great flexibility and scalability.
You can have a brochure website with only a handful of pages with Drupal and scale it up to large enterprise-level websites with thousands of pages of content with no disruption on the CMS. You can also host multi-sites with Drupal.
Customizability
In addition to being flexible and scalable, Drupal is also highly customizable. With the large community behind Drupal to support tens of thousands of modules, you can build the website just the way you want it.
Data concatenation
Service API is built into the core of Drupal. It can provide API formats such as JSON, XML-RPC, allowing managers to easily and quickly link data with other platforms. Assume today that a function is needed to easily and quickly query the bus timetable and road map on the webpage. As long as this technology is used to read the JSON file issued by the relevant organization, the website can be related in the shortest time Query function.
Security
Security has been a hot topic in the web development world in recent years. We see and hear about a large number of user data being hacked, or leaked to criminals. Experts are often on the news talking about how important it is to have a secure password on your accounts.
Personal level
On a personal user level, Drupal provides password encryption by Salt and multiple hashes. Drupal can also specify password rules, such as password complexity minimum length and password expiration time.
You can also restrict file uploads in Drupal, or allow only trusted users to upload and restrict file types. Check permissions in the upload field and specify the file type. You can restrict certain important files such as install.php, cron.php etc. from being viewed, thus preventing the core files of the website from being tampered with.
Administrative level
On the administrative level, Drupal provides detailed and customizable roles and permissions configuration to ensure the workflow is secure.
Each user can be assigned with different roles and each role can be assigned specific and detailed permission on what the user can or cannot do on the website. For example, the Administrator gives a user the role of a content editor, with the permission to add blogs, the other content editors can’t delete the blog. However, a user of the role of content approver can add and delete the blogs. The website can be given different permissions by the main administrator to perform different actions.
Enterprise-level
On the enterprise-level, Drupal supports standard authentication modes, such as SSL and two-factor authentication.
Drupal can prevent brute force attacks by limiting the number of repeated login attempts for a specific IP. It can also create an interface to allow administrators to block access to specific IP addresses or ranges, and track the source of repeated login attempts through the management page records and failed login attempts to increase user security. When abnormal login conditions occur, the administrator is notified by email.
Some websites might require a higher level of security than others, such as websites that store client information or credit card information. For these websites, Drupal can be configured with a high level of database encryption. If you don’t need to encrypt the entire database, you can also individually encrypt specific information. For example, the user’s accounts, specific form and strings, etc. can be individually encrypted in the database. Drupal’s encryption system has passed many strict specifications and regulations, such as PCI, HIPPA etc.
Form API of Drupal can ensure that data has been verified and filtered before entering the database. Each form will add a Token when it is created and put the Token into the session. Each time the form is submitted, the backend of the website checks whether the values of the two are the same. Because the attacker doesn’t have the Token added by the backend, it can be used to prevent potential CRSF attacks.
Pages, JS, and CSS are temporarily stored in Drupal’s cache. Drupal can also utilize high-performance technologies such as Memcache, Redis, Varnish and integration of all mainstream CDN(Content Delivery Network) services. This multi-layer temporary storage structure can reduce the burden on the server when the user traffic is too heavy, making Drupal the first choice for some heavy-traffic websites in the world, and it can reduce Dos(Denial-of-Service)attacks.
Drupal community level
Drupal has experts from all over the world to test security issues and send them to the security team in an encrypted manner. The security team assists the Drupal core and module developers to release fixes. At the same time as the release, it will also explain the reasons for the formation of the vulnerability and the suggestions on how to fix it. It minimizes the impact on users.
Community
To conclude on all the benefits of Drupal, it comes down to the community behind it. The work Drupal community put together is what makes it customizable with all the modules to work with. It is what makes it affordable as it is an open-source platform. It is what makes Drupal CMS secure. You can almost guarantee that any issue you have, there is a solution that someone else shared within the community.
These are some of the reasons why Drupal is a popular platform among enterprises, education institutions, and government entities. What is the goal and purpose of your website? Do you think Drupal is right for you? Talk to us and we can help.