Drupal has a large community of users and developers who provide active community support by coming up with new updates to help improve the functionality of Drupal. As of January 2017 more than 105,400 users are actively contributing. The semiannual DrupalCon conference alternates between North America, Europe and Asia. Attendance at DrupalCon grew from 500 at Szeged in August 2008, to over 3,700 people at Austin, Texas in June, 2014.

Smaller events, known as "Drupal Camps" or DrupalCamp, occur throughout the year all over the world. The annual Florida DrupalCamp brings users together for Coding for a Cause that benefits a local nonprofit organization, as does the annual GLADCamp (Greater Los Angeles Drupal Camp) event, Coders with a Cause.

The Drupal community also organizes professional and semi-professional gatherings called meetups at a large number of venues around the world.

There are over 30 national communities around drupal offering language-specific support.

Notable Drupal users include NBC, Taboola, Patch, and We the People.

SEO optimization

To achieve the highest ranking in the search engine, the website has to be SEO friendly. Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) has one of the most important roles growing businesses with the help of a website.

Drupal is a very powerful system that ensures search website optimization with its modules. It gives us the ability to control all the elements of the web pages with the help of already installed automation tools for SEO, which places it at the very top of SEO friendly CMSs. Let's look at some examples.

SEO-friendly URLs

Because search engines search for keywords in URLs, they are very important for your website. Friendly SEO URLs are actually the core of Drupal. You can create individual URLs for different content - the so-called URL aliases. Thus, so times, when URL was like “website.com?p=news&id=123” are over, better version of it is “website.com/news/article-title.” Search engines prefer the second version, and website users do too. With Drupal, you can manually set those URLs, but if you add the Pathauto module, your site automatically creates a URL that matches the content it creates. Thus, your SEO friendly URLs are created without additional effort.

Highly effective Taxonomy

With the built-in taxonomy system, categorization with Drupal is very easy. With so advanced taxonomy, you can easily organize and tag content with rich keywords. Categorization is a very important element of SEO-friendly website, and taxonomy in Drupal is flexible and easy to use.  

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Page Titles

To improve the SEO of your site, you must not forget the page title. The page title also attracts the attention of the search engine and is displayed in search results. It is also important for the reader because it attracts him to reading or sums up the essence of the page. Drupal offers us a page title module that automatically creates page titles that are interesting for the search engine.

Meta tags

There was a time when the meta tag had been considered one way to help your websites rise to the top of a search engine result. Although that is not always the case anymore, it can still be useful to have meta tags available to search engines so they can use it if they choose.

Custom content types and field

Drupal has the ability to design custom content structure. A very simple tool can be used without writing additional code. By creating a custom field on custom types of content, we can enable website editors to insert semantically correct content. This is a unique characteristic of one of the most advanced content management systems. With this tool, you can always create new and new content templates, as Drupal can handle an unimaginable amount of content, and you can display it in different ways.

Edit anything on the website

Contents should be updated regularly if you want an SEO friendly website. However, the most convenient thing in Drupal is that you can return to published content whenever you want, modify it, and add new keywords, which can increase your ranking among hits since Google's content analysis algorithms classify web pages based on fresh content. You can also easily fix any errors that occurred when publishing the content. 

Drupal Modules

Drupal websites are built with and powered by, Drupal modules. There are three different types of Drupal modules – core, contributed, and custom. Core modules are included with your original Drupal download and can be turned on or off without the need to download any additional components. Contributed modules must be downloaded independently and added to your website. Examples of contributed modules are Panels, Views, or Metatag. Custom Drupal modules are modules you write yourself. This requires extensive knowledge of Drupal’s API and PHP Programming. Modules are the easiest way to add new and useful features to your Drupal website without directly touching the codebase. The best part about Drupal modules? They’re all free!

What is a Module?

A Drupal module is a collection of files that contain code that extends Drupal functionality by adding new features. The code is built to execute within the context of the site, meaning it can use all the functions and access all variables and structures of the Drupal core. 

Where Are Modules Found?

The quickest (and most cost effective) way to extend Drupal’s functionality beyond core is to employ contributed modules. Contributed modules are packages of code created by the Drupal community and they can be downloaded and added to your website for free. Drupal’s website catalogs an exhaustive list of available modules, and these bundles of code can be downloaded directly from the module’s page on drupal.org. They are available in both tar.gz and .zip format, both of which can be unpacked after adding the module to your web server.

Why Are Modules Useful?

Modules are packages of code that enhance and extend the functionality of a base Drupal installation. The Drupal package is referred to as Drupal Core, and Drupal 9 comes prepackaged with over seventy core modules and nine themes. All of these core modules can be viewed in the /modules directory. This collection of core modules was vetted by the Drupal community in advance of Drupal 7’s release (January 2011) and they were determined to contain the base functionality most Drupal site administrators would need. Any functionality beyond this can be added by a developer or through contributed modules.

Website scalability is such a crucial aspect which has a huge say in the performance of digital firms.

Drupal is a highly scalable CMS. If you want your site to grow and be amongst the busiest of online spaces, then Drupal can scale with your needs. Even if you are already popular and offer stupendous digital experience to the customers, Drupal is scalable to cope with the gargantuan amount of traffic to your site content.

Large enterprises love Drupal with the digital presence of big names like Grammy, Weather.com, Pfizer, Time Inc., Tesla, Puma, Princess Cruises, and many more powered by Drupal. Whether it is the extreme traffic spikes on certain occasions or the constant web traffic, Drupal handles all of that with utmost ease.

Drupal accommodates content growth and supports the most content-rich sites and experiences. It scales to govern more traffic, content, and users. So whether if you have one or over a thousand content contributors, Drupal can efficaciously cope with a monumental amount of visitors, content, and Drupal users.

Access to robust APIs is one essential ingredient a modern CMS needs if it is to enhance and integrate with all steps of the customer journey. The releases of Drupal 8 and 9 have heralded several such APIs:

• The RESTful Web Services API in Drupal 8 supports a decoupled Drupal site; the communication between native mobile iOS/Android apps and a Drupal site; and, integration with web services.
• JSON:API module allows serialization and communication via JSON.
• Render API enhances the user experience through faster page rendering, and better caching protocols.
• Drupal 8’s Translation API can adjust language on your website depending on where your viewer lives.
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Added to this, Drupal’s API, querying, GraphQL, and microservices models make it easy to mold to almost any architecture with tools and features that improve the experience of both customers, admins, and developers.

Digital integration propels organizations to advance marketing communication across numerous channels. Yet without any automation, tasks — such as emails, social media, analyzing an audience and pushing them the right content at the right time — are time-consuming.

Using modules and tools, Drupal in recent versions means easier integration with automation platforms, which can amass customer demographics to help convert potential leads at the most feasible time.

Want to assign rules for marketing automation in the form of drip campaigns triggered from user interaction? If visitors to your site download a whitepaper, modules allow you to assign rules for automated marketing to these prospects; sending an email offer regarding an abandoned cart, assigning them to a particular list, or have an AI applications such as a chat bot to deliver information.

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Drupal can help with your results, including:

• Real-time sales alerts
• Data management in bulk
• Streamlined workflows
• No licensing costs
• Advanced email reporting for specific audiences
• Refinement of your marketing processes
• Less time required for marketing staff

Drupal  has cutting-edge marketing features built into the core and a myriad of contributed modules helpful in every aspect of your successful marketing. 

Drupal  modules to integrate marketing tools

• HubSpot
• MailChimp
• Google Analytics
• Marketo MA
• Salesforce Suite
• Crazy Egg Integration

and many more.

Learning Drupal can feel daunting. Its ecosystem is like a rich forest with all kinds of fruit and wildlife, but for those who aren't experienced in exploring it, the foliage can look thick, dark, and foreboding. The sounds drifting from the trees seem mysterious and enchanting. But also a little dangerous. You know there are paths through the woods, but some aren't well-marked, and some lead to dead ends. Some take you the long way around and then loop back on themselves. If you want to become a Drupal developer, what path should you take to explore the vast Drupal ecosystem?

If you are interested in becoming a Drupal professional, there are a variety of paths you can take to becoming a marketable Drupal developer. Whether you choose to embark on self-instruction, subscribe to learning videos, or enroll in Drupal career training, we suggest you develop a path that will allow you to focus on the backbone of Drupal success:

1. Skills – Learn, understand & begin working well with Drupal
   • Install Acquia dev desktop and begin to play with Drupal
   • Research and sample Drupal training and learning resources
   • Find workshops and attend beginner sessions at Drupal Events
   • Check out Drupalize.me and their amazing inventory of tutorials
2. Community – Become acquainted & participate
   • Register at Drupal.org and discover what the community is up to.
   • Participate in Drupal events such as forums, regional camps, and local meet ups
   • Find a Drupal group that speaks to your interests and engage
3. Experience – Get practical experience in building Drupal projects
   • Once you have the foundational skills, build a website
   • Participate on Drupal.org by writing documentation and testing
   • Find a company that might want your services as an intern

One of the most popular and powerful Content Management Systems (CMS), Drupal has proven to be a perfect fit for businesses at all scale levels, from very small start-ups to very large organizations. It is imperative that you take calculated risks in order to create successful businesses. You minimize your risks when you choose Drupal as your CMS framework since it is one of the most trustworthy and reliable frameworks with high flexibility.

Drupal has been adopted by many large organizations, including Tesla, GE, Whole Foods, NASA, University of Oxford, NBC, NASDAQ, Harvard University, Universal Music Group, and many others. In light of the fact these big names trust Drupal for their web content and functions, let's see why Drupal can be a good fit for your business.

Cost effective

An open-source framework has its perks and one of them is free downloads. Drupal is distributed under the GNU public license, so anyone can download, use, and extend it for free. It comes with no license fees. No matter what your company size is - cutting costs is always a good thing, right? Next step, hire an experienced Drupal development team to build and deploy your dream website. By reducing software licensing costs, you will be able to provide a more opulent online experience to your users.

Grows with your business

You will eventually need to scale your website to accommodate the needs of your medium, large or small businesses as they become more successful. Websites built with Drupal can grow along with your company. High traffic websites like Tesla, CNBC, NBA, TripAdvisor, Pinterest Newsroom, New York State and more trust Drupal to deliver powerful performances even with surging traffic. 

We can now turn our attention to Drupal's performance and functionality scalability. Today, there are over 40,000 ready-to-use modules available in Drupal to extend the functionality and features of your website. Modules like Forums, blogs, slideshow galleries, etc. can easily be added and integrated with external APIs to expand your website's functionality. Drupal’s extensive templating engine and the 2500+ available themes can help you meet your UX Design goals that will reflect your brand image. 

Security goals

Web security is a significant part of a business plan, however, many companies tend to overlook this crucial issue until something goes wrong. Of course, securing your website is not a one-time task. It is an ongoing process which needs continuous vigilance, updates and maintenance. Drupal is known for the security it offers and is the most secure CMS available today. The security team is always actively protecting the software from harmful attacks and releases regular patches, bug fixes and updates. There are tons of modules and out-of-the-box features that can further help build a secure website like Password protection, Two factor authentication, Content access, Captcha, Security kit and more. No wonder Drupal is the most preferred CMS for over 150+ countries government and intergovernmental websites who deal with highly sensitive data.

Optimize for search engines

Search Engine Optimization is key to every organization’s visibility and is a crucial element for its online marketing strategy. Websites powered by Drupal are proven to get more traffic than any other CMS. How? Drupal offers a bunch of modules and features that are specifically designed to boost your SEO ranking. For example, SEO optimized URLs make pages easily index-able for search engines. Drupal’s taxonomy features when combined with its content editing modules like CCK and Views module, ensures a strong search engine optimized website. With a seamless integration with Google analytics, you can keep a track of your clicks and analytics that can in-turn help you optimize your Drupal website better. Modules like SEO Checklist can help you better organize and maintain your SEO activities.

Flexible Integrations

Along with a powerful website, businesses leverage more than one third-party tool for business process automation. For example, Mailchimp for sending out newsletter and email campaigns, different CRMs to track customer relations and interactions, Learning Management Systems (LMS) tools to handle all learning aspects, Marketo for marketing automation, and the list can go on. Drupal gives you the flexibility to integrate with any third-party application of your choice with the help of integration modules and APIs. Since Drupal’s adoption of the API-first approach, exchanging data with external APIs is now easy and quick. 

Security

Since Drupal is an open-source system, many people wonder whether it's safe. Drupal is carefully tested by Drupal experts, and they are keeping it extremely secure. The information is constantly transmitted, passwords are encrypted, the community reviews the modules ... all these are the reasons that Drupal is one of the safest CMSs in the world. That is why it is used by a large number of organizations that have sensitive data such as the White House, UNESCO, Tesla Motors and others.

Open Web Application Security Project

Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a non-profit charitable organization that regularizes a software’s security and is focused on it’s improving. Drupal is designed to meet OWASP standards and is actively analyzed to prevent future risks.  

Security Team

The Drupal security team is a team of 40 security experts that come from different countries across three continents. They work to improve the security; their job is to identify the security vulnerabilities and make security patches. To prevent security-related fractures in code, they publish the documentation of the identified vulnerabilities and security advisories on its website.  

Password

When Drupal is installed for the first time, the password that we store is encrypted in the database. Characters are added to the password, this is said to be salt and then closed, which is a mathematical one-way function. This is a complicated procedure with the powerful SHA512 function. By doing this, the password is virtually impossible to decrypt.

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A Secure Codebase

An experienced Drupal security team is committed to the reliability and security of Drupal as an open source database. Each module contributed by the user is pre-approved by Drupal's maintainers. Then, the whole community can download the code and report any errors. Thus, each module is thoroughly reviewed by the community.

Access controls

You can configure your access control with full control level in each case. For all situations, you can set up several account types. Thus, users are limited to exclusively their role they perform. It does so without any errors, which in turn increases the security of the application.

Database encryption

By using Drupal, it is possible to encrypt a database. It can be configured to encrypt the entire site's database or only its specific parts. Such encryption types allow the Drupal configuration to pass any of the privacy standards or encryption laws.

Security reporting

CMS is the most secure if our website is properly configured and constantly updated. Drupal notifies you of updates, but at the same time reports you details of updating, so that potential security holes can be immediately corrected and there is no harm.

Drupal  and Third Party Integrations

The ability of the open source technologies to be able to integrate with the enterprise and third party applications, in the current fast paced technologically advancing times, is not a niche but at times the basic building blocks of developing the information and business processes for an organization consisting of various different software systems.

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Drupal, being one of such technologies, has seen significant adoption and acceptance among enterprises because of its innate strength to integrate with the third party applications and systems catering to varied verticals and industries. Drupal’s highly modular and scalable architecture is what makes this possible. At times Drupal needs to be integrated with connectors or adapters which act as a critical component to the integration architecture.

All the integration requirements are handled easily in Drupal with the highly extensive Library API and a very robust and extensible Services layer which also ensures that the consumption of APIs from external systems happens smoothly. Drupal’s amazing and ever growing community contributes generic modules for specific integration requirements.

Drupal and Analytics Platforms

Drupal integrates with various well known analytics platforms. Components of the analytics server can be rendered in Drupal. Also the database systems of Drupal can be exposed to the analytics platforms to be able to use the data for analysis. Some of the commonly used platforms with which Drupal integrates with are Google Analytics, Tableau, Mixpanel, KISSMetrics and WebTrends.

Drupal and E-commerce Vertical

Ecommerce as a vertical has interactions of various different systems with each other to present a fully functional business process. This calls for the need of robust communication among different systems such as Order Management, Inventory Management, Product Content Publishing, Transactions Management, Shipping and Returns Management, Payement Gateway etc. Drupal with its drupal commerce system has the innate expertise to handle all of these and can integrate with systems such as Magento, Authorize.net, Kiala and UPS Shipping.

Drupal and ERP Systems

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is the backbone software of an organization and integrates with all the other systems used in the organization. Drupal has the capability of integrating with almost all the well-known ERP systems available with ready to use generic modules available for integration implementation. If not, Faichi has the expertise needed to write the custom module to implement the same. Drupal integrates with LDAP for authentication processes and takes care of all the security potential threats that may arise in the process. In the article here we have highlighted how Drupal as a system and as a community takes care of security threats. Some of the often used ERP systems are SAP, Sharepoint, Netsuite etc. When integrating Drupal with SAP ERP, Java CAPS, the enterprise service bus software suite from Oracle is used as a connector in the integration process to facilitate in the service oriented architecture environment.

Drupal and Customer Services Vertical

Drupal integrates with the major globally known customer service products and CRMs as well. This kind of integration can be used to provide a seamless login experience to the users and display the forms at Drupal site, the data of which can be used to fetch at the CRM system. Integration can be used to fetch any information from the CRM system to the Drupal site and vice versa. The entities in Drupal are mapped with the objects in the CRM system to execute the integration. Faichi has the expertise of building both the Drupal site as well as the CRM systems which makes us a good fit to carry out such integrations seamlessly. Some of such well known products of customer services vertical are Zendesk, SugarCRM, Salesforce, ExactTarget, Hubspot, Adobe Test and Target and Janrain.

Drupal and EHR Systems

EHR (Electronic Health Record) is electronically storing all the health information of the patients in the digital format to be used by other information systems. Usage of EHR has constantly been increasing in the healthcare industry and rightly so. Integration of Drupal with the EHR system can help in creating a robust system with the strong content management system capabilities coupled with the innate strength of EHR for patients’ documents management. Some of the popular EHR systems in use that can be integrated with Drupal are NueMD, Meditouch, e-MD, PHI etc.

Drupal and Email & Marketing Systems

Any customer facing site or system is incomplete with the email and marketing tools. Drupal has the capability to integrate with the email and marketing systems such as Mailchimp, Marketo, Aprimo, Eloqua, Amazon SES etc. The benefit of integrating the email system in your Drupal site is that one can manage all the email campaigns, email lists etc. of the email system directly in the Drupal site. Adding Marketo to the Drupal site adds marketing automation capabilities to it.