Drupal 7 - The best for OS CMS platforms, but way undersold.
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Drupal 7 - The best for OS CMS platforms, but way undersold.

Drupal - developer focussed and enterprise-friendly

Drupal has essentially been developed to be a developer’s dream. Drupal allows the developer unparalleled scope for building sites with thousands of pages, creating sites that can be cloned and redeployed by non-coding admins, wildly innovative displays of content that can fulfil almost all future needs of any enterprise domain. For highly specialized tasks, Drupal can fulfil your most intricate integration requirements.

Drupal is a developer’s Mount Everest, but an admin’s piece of cake - Rakhee.S

Why Drupal has been made tough to master

And the reason it’s been made this way is that complex, tough to master coding is needed to give you a hugely flexible, highly scalable site full of unbelievably intricate content interactivity which is secure, maximally lean in the backend and easy to administer. Think of it this way, to get a pilot to the moon in the easiest way, the creators of the space shuttle need to work much, much harder behind the scenes to make it possible. And the proof that Drupal is getting more and more enterprise respect is reflected in how rapidly the requirement for Drupal developers is shooting up.

Drupal Visibility - Whither enterprise-orientation? :-(

The first thing one notices when one enters the Drupal community is a very welcoming ‘hey members, get comfy’ attitude. Very charming, except for the fact this does not directly translate to, ‘hey enterprises, see the amazing stuff we can do’. Why on earth can we not have separate drupal smileys welcoming enterprises and developers / contributors to different parts of the site specifically oriented towards them?

It might be a little off-putting for an enterprise to see how many of the community’s efforts are completely focused on presenting the benefits of Drupal to Drupal members. Considering that the aim of a high quality open CMS is to ultimately meet the needs of startups envisioning huge expansion and all sizes of growing enterprises, there isn’t as much of an outward marketing effort geared at demonstrating what Drupal can do for enterprises, which it happens to do incredibly well.  It’s all great to target developers - but why can’t an association site that is the face of the best open source CMS for both rapidly growing and extremely large enterprises make marketing Drupal easier by having a portal for enterprise executives and decision makers with site demos et al?

Drupal does, nevertheless, sell itself

If, as the trends indicate, the intricate and futuristic possibilities of Drupal CMS, developed according to one of the most stringent OS standards of vetting are selling themselves so well, then imagine what a simple effort that is going to be much easier than making countless tutorials and complex documentation would do! Note the information below:          

 

around 70% of wordpress is blogs or news according to thevalueequation.typepad.com

For the year 2013, where the CMSs used by the top 10,000 sites are concerned,

Wordpress : 50.25%
Drupal : 19.75%
Joomla : 2.45%

Blogs and simple sites will form at least 50% of Wordpress chunk of top ten thousand sites, which are definitely wise in their choice of CMS if they don’t plan to become much more intricate later. Once we eliminate this number, it is clear that Drupal has risen very high to rival Wordpress as the chosen CMS of enterprises. But this trend also indicates that a lot of websites needing very complex content management have chosen Wordpress.

While it’s magical that anyone can set up a professional, light, inexpensive, yet fully functional site so easily through Wordpress and certainly not through Drupal, Drupal, is capable in it’s current form of creating visionary sites that can materialize cutting edge marketing innovation to produce hard-core revenue and reputation increases with so much less effort on the part of the enterprise.

Wordpress - Great lightweight CMS but unsuited for Drupal's niche

It’s an accepted view among CMS experts that Wordpress does not have many of the benefits Drupal’s development-accommodating framework provides in terms of UX/branding, traffic, social integration, visitor engagement, conversion, retention, process improvement, continual innovation, etc. Drupal has visionary enterprise social business orientation incorporated right inside its framework. It already offers way beyond standard tools for SEO, social media integration and mind-boggling content integration with a lean, mean backend. And all this complexity at a well-planned and effective level of security that’s so vital for an expanding enterprise.

Imagine the White House or NASA opting for a Wordpress site! Given the right information, enterprises very well know what they want. If the Drupal.org website were to have a separate section portraying the power of Drupal sites, busy decision makers would be really helped.

Marketing efforts put in place now would help later (Drupal 8)

A lot more people would be able to contribute towards this separate marketing portal at Drupal.org, as they would not all of them be required to be technically skilled. The need of the hour is to give a hard push to the community effort by helping to showcase and market the selfless contributions of thousands of developers and architects. We have a product that can be used for a much larger chunk of the enterprise market in its current form, and in another three-four years, when the usage of Drupal 8 picks up, if we market our Drupal right, we can benefit even the dynamic enterprises using the Drupal framework in numbers more reflective of Drupal’s tremendous capabilities.

credits : http://getlevelten.com/blog/tom/drupal-crisis-point-marketing-ice-eskimos (Tom McCracken)

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us