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The adage, “Age is a flavor” well defines Drupal. Drupal is an old wine, which, since its advent in the year 2000, has undergone complex metabolic changes, but the flavor, fragrance, and the color of this Content Management System (CMS) has gotten better with time.
Content management systems have traveled a long way and Drupal has subtly risen to the top in the CMS world. At a time, when enterprises are looking to explore the potentials of Content-as-a-Service and cloud CMS is making headlines, it is important for businesses to uncover the benefits of continuously evolving Drupal solutions.
Drupal has the world’s largest open-source community of developers. However, it’s Version 5 and 6 had an infamous duration due to their alleged complexity. It was only with Version 7 that Drupal gained momentum. The current version Drupal 8 has been completely rewritten and a number of businesses are yearning to migrate to this new version. The Drupal founder believes that migrating from one Drupal version to the other would require businesses to seek the help of Drupal development service providers.
The reason behind using the services of a vendor is that Drupal has undergone architectural changes with every new version. Leveraging the expertise of Drupal development service providers can enable enterprises to understand the limitations of Drupal 7 such as incomplete Entity API; gain benefits from enhancements in Drupal 8 with respect to mobility and user experience features, for instance; and, explore the abilities of Drupal in the cloud and as a headless CMS.
Drupal: A Powerhouse for Evolving CMS Needs
When Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, first launched the CMS platform in the year 2000, little did he know that it would one day become one the world’s largest and most widely used content management systems. Reports by Statista reveal that there are currently 1.71 billion websites in the world and approximately 2.3% of them are built on Drupal. Drupal has not only turned out to be the king of content management systems but there are reasons that justify its ascension.
Other than Drupal, there are other CMSs, for instance, Joomla, Wordpress, and Blogger that hosts a number of websites in the world, but these are known for being blogging platforms. Drupal, at the same time, delivers to the contemporary business’ CMS requirements. Its incredible and unparalleled features with respect to storing, managing, and delivering content is one of the reasons that some of the renowned organizations such as NASA, Twitter, Pinterest, Harvard University, eBay, and more use Drupal to cater to their CMS needs.
Besides the commonly known advantages subjecting to security, modules, flexibility, templates, scalability, and so on, the advanced version of Drupal comes with a sea of other benefits. Businesses can leverage cloud-based SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) website builder, drag-and-drop interface, and preconfigured designs and layouts to create responsive websites on Drupal that deliver omnichannel, personalized experiences to customers across devices. It is also a known fact that Drupal in the cloud when compared to on-premise content management systems is simple. With its multi-site and content-as-service functionality, Drupal offers a preconfigured development environment, which supports full-scale digital content lifecycle management. Enterprises don’t have to worry about performance and scalability, upgrades, or disaster recovery. All such aspects are managed by Drupal and enterprises can focus more on key business areas.
Drupal and the Cloud for Enterprises
Drupal, an efficient and robust CMS, when used with the cloud helps organizations achieve high business value and more ROI. When it is about deploying Drupal in the cloud, businesses have multiple options to choose from and Acquia cloud best fits the enterprises Drupal CMS hosting needs.
Built on Drupal and hosted in AWS (Amazon Web Services), Acquia cloud offers an environment to:
- Develop websites on API-first architecture
- Manage the full digital content lifecycle
- Build future-ready web properties
- Converge innovation, customer engagement, and growth
It supports extensive web documentation, offers isolated DevOps environment, and allows complete configuration control through a single dashboard. In other words, Acquia cloud offers end-to-end digital experiences as far as the content storage, management, and delivery is concerned. It also offers the drag-and-drop interface and eliminates the need to write codes, which further makes building Drupal websites fast and simple.
It is not only fit for providing web personalization solutions but is also a boon to marketers, designers, as well as, the content authors. Recently, Acquia acquired Cohesion, which created DX8, a Drupal website builder that enables enterprises to gain the benefits of the SaaS-based CMS.
Another important Drupal tool that Acquia Cloud has is Acquia Lift. With its upgraded version, Acquia Lift makes running website personalization campaigns seamless. In order to personalize the content, marketers have to point and click, as there’s no code required.
Apart from Acquia Cloud and Acquia Lift, there’s Acquia Content Cloud. This is again a very important Drupal tool that helps organizations leverage the benefits of headless CMS. Let’s discuss it in brief.
Acquia Content Cloud
When organizations are required to manage hundreds of apps, websites, and content creators, Acquia Content Cloud helps them unify and put everything in sync. Unlike the traditional CMS, also known as coupled CMS, Acquia Content Cloud is headless/decoupled and supports syndication of content across digital channels. Delivered as content-as-a-Service through RESTful APIs or a SaaS-based solution, this headless CMS intelligently simplifies web content management and related aspects.
Acquia content cloud not only synchronizes content across Drupal websites, but it also provides:
- A unified content repository to manage enterprise-wide content
- Centralized governance and content workflow, which makes it convenient to remotely manage content editors across web properties
- Cloud computing capabilities which have helped enterprises significantly reduce manual dependency to store, manage, and deliver content
- Automated maintenance, upgrades, and installations
Drupal Help Businesses Future-Proof the Content Demand and Delivery
Content management systems have been there since the 1990s but given the contemporary demand for delivering improved digital experiences, it has become imperative for enterprises to revisit their needs for content storage, management, and more.
According to an article published by Forbes, the value for global web content management tools are expected to be worth $14.2 billion by 2024. This is because more and more businesses demand to deploy an advanced CMS to manage multiple content creators and maintain innumerable websites and apps in one go.
As far as Drupal is concerned, the stage is set for Drupal 9 to be launched in June 2020. Amidst continuous Drupal modulations, there are businesses which are busy figuring out whether the changing architecture can cater to future CMS demands. In order to be successful, they must strike the right balance between content demand and delivery and swarm up the content competition wall with speed and precision.
