We are Drupal developers, we build websites using the critically-acclaimed Drupal Content Management System and Framework. Drupal is our choice of CMS because of its flexibility, scalability and security. We can build any type or form of website you might need using Drupal, however simplified or complex the project might be, from simple blogs to complex multi-sites.
If feels good working with the most powerful CMS on earth. It should feel good owning a site powered by it.
Scalable and flexible
Being flexible and scalable means that Drupal can scale with your project, e.g. let's say you start up a new business and you want to set up a small website to test the waters and you want to start with a website of say 5-20 pages and probably 100+ users to introduce your new project. Let's say you get lucky after some time and your project grows and your business begins to expand and now you begin to have need to have more functionality and content on the website. More and more people begin to use your website. Let's say that now you will need lots of content with hierarchical categorization, also you need users to be able to query your database to easily find items they are looking for and the database is getting bigger with more content. Also you begin to have users running into thousands and multiples of thousands and many of them accessing the site simultaneously. You need to scale up, your little fancy website needs to step up and take some heat. If you built with Drupal, this is the point you would say, 'Lord, I thank you I made the right choice.' If you didn't then you will have to seek out Drupal developers like Skillmatic to rescue you and it's a complete migration of your site to Drupal. If you built with Drupal and you start scaling up, Drupal will be like, 'congrats you made it, cheer up and let's go get them!' The limit to how high you can scale would be your web server, if your server can handle it, Drupal will deliver it naturally.
Here are some of the reasons why we choose to work with Drupal:
1) Structured Content
With Drupal you do not just build pages but you create content with typed fields (field types), Drupal handles content in chunks and not blobs, this allows content to be modeled as granularly as desired; this is what it means for content to be structured. With structured content, fancy styling and markup can be added at the point of output thereby allowing the content to be stored in the database as clean as possible without necessarily containing CSS (nor depending on CSS) or HTML.
This allows different presentation of the same content using Drupal view modes and Views displays.
Structured content are reusable content; same content can be reused over and over both internally within the site and externally outside the site. External reuse makes for interoperability with other sites, platforms, applications and devices. When content is stored in chunks, you will have access to clean web service APIs that make it easier to decouple your website and serve content to native mobile applications, JavaScript (React, AngularJS, Vue.js) front ends, static site generators (Gatsby), IoT devices, in-flight entertainment systems, display devices, voice interfaces, kiosks, other browser applications, and the like. You will enjoy added advantage of channel-neutral content.
The chunks approach makes your content flexible. You will not be restrained by the boundaries of blobs.
2) Some Really Really Powerful Functionalities
With extended taxonomy, content types, user roles and some really powerful modules like Views, Panels, Rules, Token, Webform, Field API and many others; and with Drupal 8 using Views for system pages including the frontpage, and now having blocks, profiles, comments and the site contact form to be fieldable entities, you have enormous site building power to draw on.
Drupal provides fine-grained content and user permissions that give so much control in site management.
3) The Drupal API, Modules, Hooks, Events and the Plugin System
Drupal is a hybrid between a standard CMS and a very progressive Framework. With Drupal's implementation of hooks and callbacks through clever function naming convention, it hands the raw power of customization to its community. Drupal modules interact with each other through hooks and exposed APIs thereby providing a powerful architecture that offers an extremely flexible system because as a developer you can further extend available modules because of a unified coding standards, you will also find that many popular modules have lots of sub modules being other contributors extending the functionalities of existing modules.
Drupal 8 introduces the Events and Plugin systems. In Drupal 7, hooks were extensively used to alter or extend Drupal core and contributed modules. By using the Drupal hooks system, you can extend and alter functionality in your own custom module, or theme. Hooks still exist in Drupal 8 but a good number have been replaced with events. Events are essentially the object oriented way of doing hooks. The event system is built on the Symfony event dispatcher component.
The new Plugin system is a unified way of implementing pluggable components with a common API, the Plugin API. Plugins in D8 are small pieces of functionality that are swappable. This has replaced Drupal 7's hook based system of defining such functionality. The plugin types provided by D8 core are Blocks, Field formatters, Views plugins, Conditions and Migrate source.
So we do not tell our clients, 'Well, that's just the way Drupal does it.... live with it!' No. We tweak and extend the code and give our clients exactly what they want the way they want it!
4) Security and Scalability
One strenght that is always unanimously given to Drupal is security, it is agreed to be the more secure and scalable platform. This is why so many government websites from across the world are built with Drupal. Among the most dedicated Drupal users are governments from around the world. Let's start with Nigeria, some of Nigerian government websites that use Drupal include the Ministry of Science and Technology - National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion, the Ministry of Finance - Joint Tax Board (JTB), the Ministry of Finance - Tax Appeal Tribunal, Yobe State Government, Nigeria Police Academy, Nigerian Bar Association, Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority and others.
Next, the United States. The Obama administration moved The White House website to Drupal in 2009 in a landmark win for opensource software. In 2017 the Trump government moved the site to Wordpress. Aside from whitehouse.gov, DigitalGov gives list of Content Management Systems used by US government agencies. You will find how extensively the US government use Drupal from the list, check the link. Other sites from the US: The Empire State Building.
Just like the US, the UK also uses Drupal extensively: The home of The Royal Family, The British Council, The Mayor of London, it is also an extensive list from central governments to local councils to other government agencies, check the link again. LocalGov Drupal is a distribution and install profile built to help UK councils publish public facing websites quicker, cheaper and better. It is a partnership of councils across the UK and Ireland that work together to design, develop and share Drupal code to help one another serve their citizens more efficiently.
Canada uses Drupal, Prime Minister of Canada, Open Data Canada, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and lots of Canadian government websites (this is a Wiki page so a few links may be dead and a few sites may not actually run on Drupal but most are Drupal sites).
France uses Drupal, the French government, the French Senate, French Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industry and lots of French government websites (this is same Wiki page).
Russia uses Drupal, The Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the European Union, The Russian Federal Agency of Natural Resources Management, The Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia - Perm Region, The Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia - Novosibirsk Region.
Italy uses Drupal, Presidency of the Council of Ministers, The State Attorney, Italian Open Data portal, Agency for Digital Italy, The Italian Space Agency (ASI) and Linea Amica.
India uses Drupal, National portal of India, Open Government Data Platform, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, myGOV.in, Indian Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Indian Directorate General Defence Estates, India Water Portal and lots of Indian government websites.
Belgium uses Drupal, King of Belgium, Belgium.be, Prime Minister of Belgium, and Only in Belgium.
Australia uses Drupal, the Australian government, Prime Minister of Australia, Department of Health, ... in fact, the Australian Government created a content management system GovCMS (a Drupal distribution) developed as a cost-effective option for building government websites. Today (August 2020), 91 Australian government agencies use GovCMS. At the peak of the pandemic, the platform saw 2 billion hits per month, 100,000 pageviews per minute, and 187,000 concurrent users. Drupal is secure and scalable!
Other countries and governments using Drupal for their websites include the government of Estonia, Government of Bermuda, the official website of the New Zealand Government, the South African government, Kenyans.co.ke, Germany's http://www.deutschland.de, Japan's National Library, President of Dominican Republic, Central Bank of Sudan, National Library of Ireland, Sri Lankan Army, Taiwan Government Open Data, and a host of others. Find other case studies here and here.
Obviously, government websites is a 'Drupal territory'.
Security and scalability is also the reason leading educational institutions and lots and lots of schools use Drupal. Over 80 percent of top higher education websites across the world are built with Drupal so we can just say the higher ed industry is another Drupal territory. (Read this report to back up 80% instead of the more popular 70% statistic). Let's get with the list: University of Ibadan, University of Benin, University of Jos, Federal University of Otuoke, National Open University of Nigeria, Government College Ibadan, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, The Federal College of Education, Obudu, Federal Polytechnic, Daura, Howard University, Harvard University, Brown University, Rutgers University, University of Oxford, MIT, Stanford University + Stanford Sites, University of Prince Edward Island, Karlstad University, Zaman University, Bentley University, Uncommon Schools, University of Waterloo, Yale University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Cornell University (Careers), Cornell University (News), University of London, University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, University of Westminster, University of Suffolk, University of Surrey, University of West London and many others. Did you notice that all 8 Ivy League schools are in there! Find more schools here, here and here.
5) More Global Sites Use Drupal
So many more prestigious websites use Drupal, namely Bible.org, The United Nations, The World Bank Live, The World Bank Consultations, The World Bank Open Learning Campus, World Economic Forum, NASA, UNESCO, UNAIDS, USAID, CERN, ICANN (Internet Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers), International Atomic Energy Agency, The European Union, The Commonwealth, The African Union, Africa Investment Forum, World Food Programme, International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International UK, Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children Nigeria, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam International, Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), Doctors Without Borders, ActionAid, Action Against Hunger, International Rescue Committee, Greenpeace Greenwire, Rotary International, International Foundation for Electoral Systems, World Vision International, Equal Opportunity Community Initiative, Habitat for Humanity International, Environmental Defense Fund, Science Magazine, Worldwatch Institute, The Union of International Associations (UIA), The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential, Gun Violence Archive, General Electric, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Johnson & Johnson Nigeria, BioNTech SE, Moderna, Novartis, Novavax, Bayer, Virgin.com, Flight Centre Travel Group, Travel Nation, Eagle Air, Airlink, Air Seychelles, Gulf Air, Air Arabia, Oman Air, Air France–KLM, United Airlines Holdings, Lamborghini, TESLA Motors, Xerox, TAG Heuer, Nestlé Cereals, Nestlé Purina Petcare, Cummins, McDonald's Austria, McDonald's Spain, The Pulitzer Prize, The Man Booker Prize, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Emmy Awards, The Academy Awards aka The Oscars, BAFTA (The British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Awards, The MOBO Awards, Film.ru, Warner Media, Warner Records, MSNBC, NBC, Paramount Pictures, Telemundo, The Empire State Building, Pinterest, NOKIA, Taboola, Reporters without borders, International Center for Journalists, Voice of America (VOA), Agence France-Presse (AFP), The World, Sahara Reporters, France 24, The Economist, Newsweek, The International Business Times, AlterNet, The Hill, Patch Media, (James) Bond Lifestyle, The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Lady Gaga, Eminem, Bruno Mars, Lil Uzi Vert, Budweiser, Budweiser Nigeria, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), Major League Soccer, National Basketball Association (NBA), Arsenal FC, Sevilla FC, the Australian Open, Football Association of Finland, Imperial War Museums, Chatham House, Turner Broadcasting General Entertainment multi-site, MTV UK, InStyle Germany, Playboy Germany, Beat FM Lagos, Beat FM London, Naija FM Lagos and Ibadan, Lagos Talks FM, Catholic.com, Al-Islam.org, Nasdaq, Amman Stock Exchange (ASE), Euronext, FCMB, The EXIM Bank of the United States, The Schaffhauser Kantonalbank (SHKB) of Switzerland, VPBank of Vietnam, Mint.com, PayU Multisite, Opensource.com from Red Hat, Magento, Magento Chinese Service Support, DocuSign, Rackspace, Keyword Tool, We Make Websites, Typepad, Tableau Software, Letyshops, Commission Junction, IBM, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), LiNUX.COM, Linux Journal, Windows Central, Android Central, French Community of Ubuntu Users, The Common Application, The College Board, WAEC Nigeria, Schoology, The Church of England, McLean Bible Church, Salisbury Cathedral, United Church of Canada, Kenneth Copeland Ministries, Evangelical Free Church of America and many others. Find more sites here, here, here, here or here.
6) The Community
Drupal has a very large community that is very active, helpful, helping one another and filled with so much love for the code!
7) Developer Pay
Demand for Drupal developers is increasing globally and is going to keep increasing, judging by available pointers.
8) Drupal 8 implements Industry Standards technology
Up until now, Drupal had reinvented itself with every major version release making big rewrites, sacrificing backward compatibility for constant evolution. Version 8 was a huge change from version 7, template engine changed from PHPTemplate to Twig, paradigm changed from procedural to mostly object-oriented and lots of major changes. Version 7 broke compatibility with 6 and so on. But now, version 9 is compatible with version 8. Drupal 8’s path to Drupal 9 did not come in one giant leap like past major releases. Drupal 8’s development took semantic path with releases such as 8.0.0, 8.1.0, 8.2.0, and so on until 9.0.0 was reached. This is likewise how the path from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 is taking. Backward compatibility has now come to Drupal!
Drupal 8 builds natively with HTML 5 and aligns with the latest PHP 7 standards like PSR-4, namespaces, and traits, and uses top notch, outstanding external libraries like Composer, PHPUnit, Guzzle, Zend Feed Component, Assetic to name a few. Drupal 8 also adopts modern, object-oriented code that's the order of the day. Instead of using only the hook-oriented paradigm and the procedural programming, Drupal with version 8 chose a way of involving popular technologies and applying object-oriented methodologies. Changes affected almost all the main parts — from the core functionality to the template engine. D8 adopts lots of Symfony components including: Console, DependencyInjection, EventDispatcher, HttpFoundation, HttpKernel, Polyfill Iconv, Process, Routing, Serializer, Translation, Validator and Yaml. Adding the Symfony components to Drupal 8 had the biggest impact on its development. Drupal became even more flexible than it was before. Developers got a great opportunity to follow the modern technologies and use the object-oriented programming style. This opens up Drupal to the wider PHP community as Drupal developers will be working with skills that are usable in the wider PHP community outside Drupal and more non-Drupalers can now easily come in to work with Drupal.
A group known as PHP-FIG (FIG stands for Framework Interoperability Group) are working to create common standards for the PHP community. These standards are known as PHP Standards Recommendations (PSRs). The idea is to get PHP developers working in reusable patterns and writing code in common ways such that similarities will exist in between frameworks and libraries can be written in ways that will be usable across frameworks. Adoption of these standards is optional for PHP developers. Drupal from version 8 aligns with lots of these standards.
D8 also ships with in-built Web Services that makes it possible to use itself as a data source, and output content as JSON or XML (JSON:API became stable in Drupal core 8.7). You can even post data back to Drupal 8 from the front end. Hypertext Application Language (HAL) is implemented in Drupal 8 and makes exploitation of web service capabilities less painful. This means that information on your website can be consumed by not just human beings using web browsers but the information is available in formats that can be consumed by other programmes, apps and devices. This makes for cross-platform and cross-device interoperability,
Read further about the new things in Drupal 8. Meanwhile Drupal 8 came to end-of-life on November 2, 2021 and has now passed the baton to Drupal 9.
9) Native multilingual support
Multilingual support is in Drupal 8 core with up to 100 languages to choose from and 4 core modules for language and translation. During installation, Drupal uses browser preference-based detection to suggest a language for you and if you choose one, it will automatically download and install the translation files. Every single content entity is translatable out of the box.You can set block visibility per language too. Plus, there’s now a powerful back-end system for transliteration.
10) Drupal is API-first
Drupal is an API-first content management system and has (as Drupal is known for flexibility) a very flexible approach to the decoupled architecture. Drupal's decoupled architecture has 3 approaches, namely coupled, progressively decoupled and fully decoupled. This gives more options (as Drupal is known for letting you decide out of several options) for a decoupled setup. Even with the coupled approach you can still expose your API endpoints and share content to your consumer applications. Read more about the amazing ways to decouple Drupal.
11) The Drupal CLI
Drush (short for Drupal Shell) is a Command Line Shell for Drupal that has been around since the days of Drupal 4 in 2007; it has become a favorite for Drupal developers and advanced site builders. With Drush you can download, install and uninstall modules; backup your site, update your Drupal instance, run database commands, export and import site configurations, manage users and roles, clear or rebuild site cache, etc. The latest version, Drush 9 has been rewritten to embrace the new ideas in Drupal 8 including OOP, dependency injection, composer builds, etc. Drush 9 also brings lots of additional features like generating content entities, configuration entities, modules, etc. (We still prefer to work with Drush 8 though).
Drupal 8 comes with a new CLI called Drupal Console; with Drupal Console you can generate a new theme, module, entity bundle, entity content, entity config, form, profile, etc by running a line of command; you can debug and inspect your Drupal site; you can rebuild cache; create nodes, vocabularies, users; import and export configuration settings; perform database operations; install and uninstall modules; download, install and unistall themes; and lots of features.
Composer has become a standard in the PHP community and Drupal has embraced the use of Composer to manage dependencies, in fact, the recommended build is to install Drupal 8 with Composer as against manual installs. You can install Drupal and its dependencies with Composer, download modules and their dependencies with Composer and then manage with Drush or Drupal Console. With these tools you can set up a Drupal project without touching a GUI/browser.
Working from the command line, you can get things done so fast while someone using GUI is still clicking around. Also there are other advantages to managing your site with Drush as against GUI, Drush can tell you about errors on your site that the web browser will not tell you.
But, hey, you must not use a Drupal CLI to work with Drupal, they are there for the devs and advanced site builders that can use them. You can still build and manage your site the regular web browser way, but if you are a PHP web developer by any definition, you had better embrace Composer as earliest as you can because it is already the standards for dependencies management.
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If you need a Drupal website, get in touch with us, we are Drupal specialists and thoroughbred professionals.
