CMS Explained with Drupal

In a web world, a CMS is a Content Management System. For Ex. Consider you are on a WordPress website and you are looking at a particular web page, where you are seeing, a Menu bar on the top i.e. a navigation bar, a Header, a post with some graphics, a banner and a title, Some text etc. this is called as content.

If you want to manage this content or want to change it or add new content etc. you can do it by simply logging into an administration area of the website. This area is just for managing the website contents. In this administration area, you can see that same post which you were looking at a while ago. In this area you can see the same Title, text, if you scroll down some you can see the banner which you were looking at on the website.

Now the administration page does not edit or manage the header or the navigation menu because we want it to be the same on every page. So this page is all about editing the content, just for that particular post on the webpage.

Let us discuss some more:
If you go to the appearance on the left side of the administration area and if you select Menu option under it then you will see a site navigation which matches with what you see at the top of the webpage. If you want to reorder if you simply need to drag and drop and save the menu.

If you want to add a new content to it then the content management system knows about the contents of your site. So you can simply click on the required option and select add to the menu button and then save menu. Thus it would appear on the webpage you are seeing.

If you don’t want it then you can just easily remove things from the menu and each particular theme allows you to save where you want your menu to appear. You can select the required option from the list of options. If you want a Header Bar Navigation then click that option. But just with a click of a button you cannot move the navigation bar next to any logo or put it in the footer. In the old days when we used to develop web pages that required a lot of coding.

A wonderful thing about a Content Management System is that you don’t need to know any of that at all. You just have to know is to understand how to point at a right place, click at a right time and type your content. Now I have explained the term CMS with WordPress, but there are many Content Management Systems.

While choosing a CMS you need to look at the platform you have and know what is available to you and choose the right one for you.
Today we are going to look at a Popular CMS called Drupal.

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a free open source software platform that was released back in 2001 which was written in PHP allowing both individuals and Businesses to set up many different kinds of websites.

The CMS works well for both technical and non-technical users and it is scalable for nearly all types of projects. The Technology is both reliable and secure as well as flexible. There are also many free communities out there that can help you to give you solutions to all problems as well as developers that you can hire to custom work for you.

With a million different kinds of websites running on the Drupal website platform you can rest assure that the included options are quietly customizable. Many top websites trust in their project to the Drupal platform. But the changes you need to make can get more technical. For ex. the CMS like Drupal does have produced a independence on the outsider design developers and coders. It is important to get familiar with different building blocks in case that make up the platform. This includes Plugins and modules as well as templates. If you or your firm has more experience for another platform it may make more sense to go with that platform system instead. For ex. WordPress is a little more limited when it comes to making customized changes. But it has more options right out of the box; including user-friendly setup, themes, and plugins. That should be something that you consider as well. If you like to set up a website using Drupal or another CMS you can do that.

Let’s see Why you should use Drupal?
It can be used for a lot of organizations that’s why there are so many wide ranges of clients who use it.
So what it does?
All the websites you visit through the internet in a day to day life are all pretty similar. In other words, we can say that you will notice a lot of common platforms in them. Like these websites have some kind of a logo on the top side or top left-hand corner. They often have big images that are used to brand the organization or to market to the consumer or they also have a menu that links to the other web pages on the website. They also often have features like listed contents may be a listed news or in case of screenshot which may contain a list of products and a lot of times these things may be styled a little bit differently but the actual functionality would be the same. To see the pattern of different websites that means while making a website you make a list of the contents which you want or it may happen that there may be a similar website like your website. So rather than starting from scratch, you can start with existing tools that are why Drupal is used. It’s not the only tool but there are also other tools like WordPress or Share Point.
So most of the websites have a header with your logo and organization name, A footer with your contact information, Navigation pages of content, maybe articles and events, maybe a search form, URLs, A contact page etc. But there are also some variations depending upon the purpose of developing the website but above points are similar.

Features of Drupal: Because of the following features Drupal platform is used for developing millions of websites.

• Content Management
• Taxonomy for Organizing Content
• Flexible Navigation System
• Comments
• Search
• Content Listings
• Contact Form
• Nice content Authoring Experience
• Multilingual Content and User Interface
• User Management
• Accessibility
• Responsive Design