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Despite the recent proliferation of low-code/no-code platforms and other innovative content management tools, Drupal has remained a dominant content management platform for nearly 25 years now.
While new initiatives such as Drupal CMS are making the technology more appealing for smaller businesses and empowering less tech savvy users, Drupal has typically been best suited for more complex, high-level use cases.
Besides enterprise uses, some of the top areas where Drupal shines are universities and other higher education institutions; nonprofits and other NGOs; and various governments all over the world. Let’s take a look at what exactly makes Drupal such a great fit for all these.
Open source
One of Drupal’s chief benefits is its open source nature. The complete lack of licensing costs make it an incredibly cost efficient platform with a low total cost of ownership in the long term.
This is particularly relevant for nonprofit organizations which often lack the funding for a streamlined proprietary plaform, but still need enterprise-level website building and content management capabilities.
Customizable
Drupal’s open source nature also enables a modular architecture that facilitates flexibility and scalability. As such, it can easily power future-proof digital strategies while avoiding vendor lock-in or reliance on the software provider to introduce new features, as well as any risks of your workflows becoming compromised if unexpected licensing changes occur.
While Drupal facilitates custom development with its adherence to latest industry standards of PHP 8.3 and Symfony 7.1, its rich ecosystem already provides a plethora of community contributed solutions that provide ready-made functionality – namely, through over 50,000 open source modules available free of charge. This means that it’s very easy to find a solution that fits your needs out of the box, or needs minimal tailoring to fit them.
Secure
Government is one of the sectors where security is especially important. Since Drupal has long been a top choice for several governments and government institutions, it’s become one of the open-source CMS platforms most optimized for security.
There are several factors contributing to the security of Drupal. All community-contributed modules need to be approved by maintainers, and any security issues/risks can be easily reported through Drupal’s security advisories, which a dedicated security team reviews and provides solutions for them.
On top of everything, Drupal’s strong & active community makes sure that security risks are discovered and resolved before they can lead to crucial issues for businesses and organizations utilizing the potentially affected software.
Robust
As a long-standing open source giant with over a million global contributors, Drupal offers a robust and versatile platform that can power high-level content management and other back end functionality. It can power complex publishing/editorial workflows, with a well defined system of roles and permissions which allow for a high degree of flexibility (e.g. both students and university staff being able to use the same back end system).
Furthermore, Drupal has very strong API support which facilitates integration with other top technologies, both as a monolithic CMS or a decoupled platform with one or more front-end frameworks. React and Vue are some of the top choices to pair with Drupal, with the best support from the Drupal ecosystem; the React framework Next.js even has a dedicated Drupal integration called Next-Drupal.
Supports multisite & multilingual
One of the areas where Drupal really stands out is the support it provides for multilingual websites and multisite digital platforms. Government organizations and universities/higher education institutions typically need special subsites to reach their diverse audiences (e.g. state/county websites for government, department sites for universities).
Moreover, in the case of more than one official language, government websites need to be multilingual, as is the case in Canada and Belgium, for example. Drupal facilitates and streamlines management of these multilingual setups and ensures accurate information and a robust infrastructure across all of them.
Lastly, nonprofits benefit from this feature of Drupal by being able to spin up sites for one-off campaigns faster and more easily, including localized campaigns in different languages. The user friendliness of Drupal CMS makes this even easier now thanks largely to Recipes.
Steady cycle of innovation
Despite its long history, Drupal keeps innovating, both through regular Core releases as well as through key initiatives such as the recently released Drupal CMS, which brings advanced site building even closer to non-developer users.
Drupal Core has adopted an interesting and convenient approach to releases: new features are released in minor versions, while major versions are intended to update dependencies while maintaining backward compatibility. This makes major upgrades painless and new innovations easy to implement and put to great use.
Drupal CMS
Government organizations, nonprofits and higher education institutions often lack dedicated development teams and thus need effective tools that facilitate site building and content management without the need for advanced development expertise. While SaaS solutions tend to offer excellent low-code & no-code site building features, budget restrictions often prevent organizations from adopting these proprietary platforms.
The new Drupal CMS is designed to solve these exact issues by providing a quick and painless setup through pre-configured packages of common functionality called Recipes, geared towards marketers and other non-developer users.
It also offers other advanced but user-friendly low-code/no-code tools such as site building with the help of AI agents. The Experience Builder, an upgrade to Drupal’s Layout Builder slated for release later this year, intends to make site building even faster and easier.
Conclusion
Throughout the years, Drupal has not only maintained but actually continually improved its status as a top content management platform, especially in sectors such as government, nonprofit and higher education.
The recent innovations in the Drupal ecosystem have made it an even more useful tool for non-technical users, with more top-grade features intended for them coming soon. If you’re looking for a powerful future-proof technology for a nonprofit, university or government digital strategy, Drupal may just be the right fit.
Reach out to us if you’d like to learn more about how to take advantage of what Drupal has to offer and tailor its capabilities to your specific needs.
