Drupal

To quote the well-intentioned, but slightly worrying, Drupal song:

"If you want a website and you need a system, to manage your content: Drupal."

We are huge Drupal fan, boys and girls, and while not a Drupal shop, we do use Drupal in 99% of our projects. I guess you could say that Drupal and VentureWeb are in an "open," and somewhat saucy, relationship (keep reading for this to make sense). Drupal is our weapon of choice when building websites. We've used it with great success over the last three years and strongly recommend its consideration in any new projects for its extensive and flexible structure.

For those of you still living in 1987, Drupal is a fantastic, open source (perhaps now you get the pun above), content management platform that lives inside your computer box in the Internet pipes. "Platform?" I hear you say. Yes. It's a set of tools made by code (modules) that can be used to build any type of website you could want to build: brochure websites, Fortune 500 websites, university websites, government websites, tourism websites (gasp). The list goes on. And not just websites in the classical sense, either: intranets, E-commerce, mobile applications can all be created using Drupal. If you want to see what awesome stuff Drupal has been used to build, check out this list of sites on the website of Dries Buytaert (Drupal's fearless leader).

Some key benefits to using Drupal:

  • It's free to download, use and modify.
  • You own your code - no licencing fees or vendors
  • There are hundreds of thousands of Drupal developers around the world
  • A lot of functionality has been written for Drupal in the shape of third-party modules that can be downloaded (freely) and installed into your Drupal websites
  • The Drupal project is stable and not going anywhere (started in 2001 and continues to grow)
  • Drupal is highly customizable with seperated theme (look and feel), code (nuts and bolts) and database (content) layers.
  • Drupal contains a number of key features out of the box, such as content types and management, user permissions and system access control, theme options, search, statistics, URL aliases and contact forms to name but a few.

Drupal is more than code; it is also community, and we try to take an active part in our local Drupal community by attending and presenting at monthly meet ups and by sponsoring Drupal camps. We also try to help out on Internet Relay Chat and in forums whenever we can. We're the first to admit that we could be contributing more back to the Drupal community, so we're looking to step that up as we grow. We're keen to meet any Drupallers who might be based in Squamish. Come to the next InsideEdgeBC meet up and let's chat hook_menu(), or swing by the office for a coffee and some theme_page_preprocess().