If you’re considering building a site that doesn’t have a content management system (CMS), we’ve got news for you: it’s not the ‘90s anymore, kid. But assuming you’re not stuck in the last ice age, exactly which CMS, of the hundreds of options out there, should you be using? Alas, there is probably no single right answer, but here are the reasons we like and use Drupal and think you should too.
1. It’s free – Drupal doesn’t cost a penny and it never will. Some web developers are quick to tell you this is a disadvantage; you get what you pay for, right? Often true, but in the case of Drupal, we respectfully disagree.
2. Lots of developers use it – Sure, there’s probably some obscure CMS out there that would be marginally better for the particular needs of your site. If your developer is the only living guy who understands how to set it up, however, you could find yourself in a tight spot if you want to make changes a few years down the road only to find that he’s closed up shop and moved to Mexico. If you use Drupal, however, it will be relatively easy to find someone else who can make changes to your site should the person who built it go missing or start charging you exorbitant prices.
3. It's secure and relentlessly updated – Ah, the beauty of open source software. The fact that Drupal is both open source and has a huge following means there are literally thousands of people working on fixing bugs and updating it (it’s the same reason Wikipedia is more thorough and current than a published encyclopedia could ever hope to be). No profit making company could ever hope to have as many people working as hard on its software as Drupal does.
4. It allows for great user management – Since Drupal was originally designed with community-based websites in mind, it has impressive options for setting up multiple editors for a website. You can set up different user roles like “admin”, “moderator”, “authenticated user”, or any custom role you want and assign each role a different level of editing capabilities. For example, you can easily let certain people from your organization blog on your site without having access to the rest of the content, have a moderator check their posts before they go live, and then allow site visitors to comment on the posts.
5. It's proven to work – If you don’t want to take our word for it, take NASA’s. Here are just a few of the many well-known sites that run on Drupal:
The Onion
Amnesty International
NASA
MTV (UK)
The New York Observer
Update: The White House just relaunched as a Drupal-based site.
If you want to see more Drupal sites, feel free to check out some of the examples our portolio.