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

Valuebound is pleased to announce that we are now Drupal support partners for Bangalore's renowned BMS college of engineering. The college has been rated as one of the top 25 Engineering Institutions in India by various media sources. We will be providing website monitoring, website maintenance and website troubleshooting for their Drupal CMS website. We welcome this opportunity to service our valued client and to establish yet another fruitful Drupal relationship.

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

Valuebound, in association with AMC Engineering College, Bangalore will be conducting a Drupal in a day training for the students of IT & related courses. This training will introduce Drupal as a content management system that is the leading choice of complex, large-scale, high-volume websites.

During this workshop you will learn

• Basic Drupal terminology (blocks, taxonomy, aliases, and more)
• Managing content and users
• Adding automatic image resizing
• Configuring popular Drupal modules
• Constructing a Drupal site

Through this interactive 8-hour session, we intend to give potential and beginning users a hands-on experience in configuring popular Drupal modules and in creating a Drupal site. We hope to create enough of an interest in Drupal among the students to help them visualize it as part of their educational and career aspirations.

Session Details:

Date: Feb 22, 2013
Timings: 9AM to 5PM
Location: AMC Engineering College
Phone:   +91 (808) 804-8711
Email: info@valuebound.com

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

Marketing automation involves reaching your clients online and making use of carefully implemented automation to target individual consumers with result-oriented sales efforts. The content of the target messages is often derived from automated analysis of consumer browsing and buying patterns.

Drupal integrates extremely well with reputable marketing automation tools such as Marketo, Eloqua and Genius. Selecting an experienced Drupal developer who is capable of complicated integration, while vital, is just not enough. This post talks about why it is of paramount importance that you and your development team / provider need to discuss and meticulously plan such integration to ensure your marketing automation efforts actually translate to increased sales.

Marketing automation, like cake-baking, needs the right ingredients and the right recipe to produce the right results - Rakhee.S

The best development efforts, even if wildly successful, will not translate to increased sales if you do prioritise the following:

Make your marketing automation effort an opportunity to review your sales and marketing processes.

Marketing automation is a very powerful way of both saving money by automating marketing, as well as increasing revenue due to increased sales. However, these benefits occur only when the customer feels benefitted by your marketing efforts. Highly targeted automated marketing is possible only if the processes of analysing consumer preferences are bug-free, logical and practicable. So revise your processes to make maximal use of your automated marketing facilities to increase revenue. This will ensure you don’t end up selling ice to eskimos or sea water to Tahiti.

Plan meticulously, plan jointly and plan expertly.

You need to plan extremely well how to derive the content that goes into the sales messages with which you inform your customer. Hire marketing experts who’ve succeeded in increasing online sales and social shopping. Ensure that your design and development team sits down with you at every juncture, for it is they who will have a direct effect on:

1. How well your ecommerce platform supports the dedicated marketing automation apps
2. Getting you the maximum revenue benefit with the leanest and most functional integration (think ease of workflow planning and implementation)
3. How the process of customer interaction that follows the targeted marketing effort is made smooth, empowering, transparent and enjoyable.

Create workflows for your CMS platform facilitating customer purchases after targeted marketing.

What happens after the marketing effort is the biggest factor that will make or break your marketing automation initiative. It is a complicated procedure to plan facilitation of consumer activity post targeted automated marketing even at the planning stage of your integration. If you botch this up, creating such processes after your marketing automation applications are integrated will be a patch up job at the best and a failure at the worst. Verify the credentials of the developer you hire, ensure they’re great strategists and consultants, too. Talk to their clients, especially those for whom intricate integrations have been successful.

Plan for the simple, the intricate, the futuristic.

Use your own expertise, industry insights, and expert analysis of trends to judge what efforts will get you dividends. Simple batch messages might be required on special occasions along with more narrowcasting efforts. Plan for both kinds. Nascent trends can become tomorrow’s must-haves, think relatively small sites driving disproportionate amounts of social shopping. Plan for all, especially if accommodating such possibilities is not prohibitively expensive and time consuming.

Consider what might go wrong, plan to prevent it.

Keep in mind there is a busy human being at the other end of your automated marketing. They think, and act, and most importantly feel. Use your marketing automation to make them feel nice, and you build your reputation which will ultimately lead to recommendations, site visits, great reviews and of course increased market share in the cutthroat ecommerce world. But misdirected, bug-ridden messages or simply a failure to read your customer’s pulse, or to ensure a great UX and customer service as well will cause even the most skilfully planned marketing automation to collapse. Play your own devil’s advocate; do not hire yes-men. Ensure you get expert planners and developers who are concerned enough for you to speak their minds on how to prevent strategy errors.

A mere decade ago, e commerce was a scary word for many customers. Today, even in developing countries, a huge number of consumers prefer online purchases for the discounts and time-saving. Yet, at a brick and mortar shop, it is much, much easier for the consumer to follow caveat emptor (let the buyer beware). Ecommerce stores have unique difficulties as a direct result of not being able to deal with customers face-to-face. For instance, a single unforeseeable error on your part, such as the inadvertent shipping of a defective product, launches your consumer on a tedious and expensive journey of phone calls and lost time. The very policies you create with ethical intentions to protect your consumer, cause them to spend time and money and lead to dissatisfaction.

It is important, therefore, to make up for these unavoidable difficulties with very, very strong efforts of enhancing customer experiences wherever possible. This is why it is vital to plan out your marketing automation efforts to be the very best in enhancing a helpful, desirable, smooth and pleasurable experience for your consumer. You must seriously consider what might go wrong and prevent it from happening. With the challenges specific to your being an online seller, ensuring a proper marketing automation will go a long way in mitigating your future anxieties.

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

Valuebound Interactive Solutions is pleased to announce the contribution of a brand new module to the prestigious open source Drupal community. The Content-Type Dependency module sponsored by BuKMarker and developed by the Valuebound team has now been approved by the community and is available for download on drupal.org/project/content_type_dependency.

This module has been enhanced and fine-tuned to incorporate feedback by the community. This process of approval through community participation has ensured that the module has passed strict Drupal quality standards. Issues and feature requests should be created at the community page, URL drupal.org/project/issues/content_type_dependency.

The Content-Type Dependency module allows admins to create rules. Each of these rules will prevent a user from adding one particular content type unless the user has finished adding a specified number of other content type. The number can be specified by the admin.

Some possible uses of this module are:

• A market analyst has to contribute industry insights (content type) before publishing his profile on a site.
• A seller has to add a company page for her to be able to start adding a products page
• A blogger needs to add his profile before he can start posting blogs

Please contact Valuebound for paid customization and additional features.

Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.   (Henry Ford)

As things stand now, google keyword planner shows almost a million searches per year on the exact term ‘open source CMS’. Add search results for all other terms related to the same concept, and it remains no secret that clearly, millions of people have Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress on their minds. For the decision makers thinking of which CMS system to choose, this post aims to present an unbiased view of the pros and cons of the three major open source CMS players, Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla.

Getting credible CMS insights on the web (?)

The world wide web is full of articles, opinions and discussions on major CMSs, but as most enterprises would attest, it’s tough to verify the credentials of those authoring most of the insight you gain on the web about pretty much anything. This applies to open source CMSs in a big way, because

1. Open source CMSs have very passionate supporters who are also very vociferous .
2. Articles authored by those who are excellent writers can fool a reader into thinking they necessarily know their CMSs.
3. Those who have used a particular CMS might offer insight on some other CMS without having used it.
4. Open forums are often so open that absolutely anyone, including those who’ve never used a CMS, can offer various opinions.

As such, we recommend you get your information by communicating with companies that have direct experience of working with multiple CMSs.

Aim of this article

In this article, we offer you a contemporary perspective on the latest versions of Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. Our views have come about through our use of different CMSs to service enterprises across domains and sizes. As enterprise-oriented PHP experts who’ve used Wordpress and Joomla as well, before settling to specialize on Drupal, we do have an astute awareness of situations which might be better served by Wordpress or Joomla, and do think that it is in our good interests to share what we know.

We hope it will help you to make an informed decision, given the present scenario, with 2014 looming large on the CMS horizon. In this post, we discuss all three major open source CMSs of Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla, with a focus on you as a person intending to meet business and marketing requirements through a quality open source CMS.

When to use Wordpress

Considering Wordpress, it is more aimed at ‘consumers’ as opposed to enterprises, and is a great choice within that market. If you’re an individual or a small group of enthusiasts wanting to set up a blogging site, or a news site, Wordpress is going to suit you better than Drupal or Joomla. Now, if as a decision maker for a business, you need a simple, easy to operate, inexpensive site that will not need to become much more complex in the future, Wordpress will most certainly give you an efficient, lighter, faster, easy to operate and maintain site that does not require prolonged learning periods and coding expertise. For a simple, easy to maintain site that will not magnify in complexity later, or that meets temporary needs, Wordpress is a high quality offering that is popular as it is best suited to the purpose. You will not need to spend much money or time on development efforts either. Since there are millions of non-enterprise sites or simple enterprise sites set up on the net by those who do not want an intensive learning curve, you will find that Wordpress is used much more than Drupal or Joomla.

When Drupal and Joomla would be better than Wordpress

Wordpress, however, will let you down if complex workflows and multiple content types (blogs, news, product information, user details) that have to draw information from each other are going to be the norm, now or in the future. If you’re thinking of building a dynamic enterprise that’ll meet complex needs in future, even if your current needs remain simple, it is better to avoid the expensive and somewhat disruptive experience of having to migrate your precious data and processes to a different CMS because your initial CMS cannot keep up with your business needs. That brings us to complex sites, or sites that are going to get complex in the future even in ways that are currently unforeseeable.

Drupal or Joomla?

As PHP coders who have worked with recent versions of both Joomla and Drupal, we can say with assurance that both are good for building complex sites. Both have been around for long, and have passionate supporters who help and guide each other. The difference is that Drupal is created to be very very developer friendly. Once a developer masters Drupal, which is a very intensive effort due to the sophisticated options this CMF offers, he or she can build very intricate, futuristic and efficacious web sites. Joomla, on the other hand, can be used to build quite complex websites without that much of a learning curve. What does this mean to you as a decision maker?

Why Joomla

Now, should you require a site that for some reason does not require as much of learning for the developer to master, is still a quality offering meeting complex needs that do not really need to be too sophisticated, you could choose Joomla, provided you are not expecting future contingencies that are too intricate. Your choice would be dependent in that case on pricing, future plans/expectations for site functionalities and developer quality and availability as well. The process of settling on a good Joomla developer is, to be honest, easier than finding an expert Drupal developer, due to the tremendous skill, versatility and knowledge a Drupal expert just has to have.

Why Drupal

But then, if you want to introduce a lot of interaction between the various types of content on your site, or keep adding / trying new or futuristic business strategy ideas, you would need a site that lends itself to sophisticated development. Drupal, being developer oriented and developer friendly, would allow a skilled developer to implement more numerous, and more complex possibilities than Joomla would. Even as it currently stands, Drupal does allow for more advanced content manipulation and interaction and future innovation, accompanying significant scaling, enhancement and even fluctuations.

In this context, you might want to go through our recent post ‘Drupal - A powerhouse for evolving enterprise platforms’. In this post, also presented to accommodate your requirements as a decision-maker, we talk about Drupal’s suitability for growing enterprises, with a special discussion on Drupal 8, due to be released in 2014, and what it would mean for your business.

Things you should consider while choosing an open source CMS

Seamless integration with third party applications:

Often, there are highly specialized functionalities required by expanding enterprises, which no single CMS can achieve. Today’s multifunctional enterprise platforms necessarily need to integrate seamlessly with other specialized applications. Yet, often, integrating third party applications can be a complicated task. Your CMS should allow a developer oriented structured coding that is planned to accommodate the most complex integration requirements with efficiency. This consideration will prove invaluable as you develop and grow.

Thriving support environment:

Your platform can function well enough for you to concentrate on your core business only if there is extremely good support in place for your CMS. The open source community associated with your CMS should be capable of providing basic and advanced support in the form of chat, forums, documentation, FAQ’s. A thriving support culture will mean that almost all your problems will have been dealt with before, ensuring speedy resolution.

Established update systems:

Your chosen CMS should have a proven policy of improvements, updates and new releases with backward compatibility. The CMS community should maintain support to the earlier versions for a few years after releasing the latest version. There should have been a lot of community support during previous updates, version releases and porting situations.

Conclusion

The best open source CMSs are today supported by thousands of extremely talented developers who have created websites for organizations as high profile as the White House and NASA. Open source CMSs are capable of fulfilling multiple enterprise functions due to the sheer number and advanced expertise of their contributors. You do not have to pay costly licensing fees, or be locked in to a vendor when you choose open source. With a judicious choice of open source CMS, you can be sure you will keep getting updates and new releases that enhance your platform or add / suggest new capabilities. Choose your CMS very carefully, as choosing an appropriate CMS capable of meeting current and future goals will ensure that at least for the next ten years, you can focus on using your CMS to grow and mould your business instead of having to worry about migrating all your precious data, functions and workflows to a better CMS.

Do go through our article : ‘Drupal - A powerhouse for evolving enterprise platforms’.

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

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.   (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)

CMS - Indispensable part of enterprise strategy

The enterprise domain today, is extremely competitive. And it is hugely so because of the web. Clients flock to the provider offering the latest innovation, and excellence in customer service works only when combined with an impressive digital experience. You necessarily need to keep scaling, changing workflows and backend processes, and creating sophisticated functionalities as a result of innovations or improvements or your changing needs and changes in your market / clientele. The CMS platform you choose needs to be highly adaptable while being very stable and secure. As things stand now, the reason we at Valuebound have shifted our focus to Drupal is that it empowers us to guarantee our clients a huge degree of stability and security while facilitating major and complex changes or enhancements to meet their evolving business and marketing needs.

Drupal - Developer-friendly is enterprise-friendly

Drupal was conceptualized to be more developer-oriented than the other open source CMSs. Even the most brilliant and innovative development initiatives using the best of developers can fail should the CMS itself not provide the structure to facilitate that effort. Choosing Drupal for your enterprise increases the functional possibilities of your platform. Once you hire a Drupal master, you can be sure their expertise and skill will be fully accommodated by the Drupal development framework. Thinking more from a business vision point of view, Drupal will give you very advanced sites and take care of complex contingencies better than other open source CMSs as things stand now and in the near future.

Drupal - Strict standards of module (plugin) development

Drupal’s strict quality and security guidelines subject development efforts to a very rigorous screening process in which the entire community participates. This ensures that a highly effective security mechanism is already in place now and throughout adaptation. The Drupal community consists of volunteer developers who have contributed to sites such as the White House, NASA, Grammy, The Economist to name just a few, and they are part of the quality Drupal effort in a significant way. 

This community spirit is why Drupal has come up with plugins that are capable of meeting the very latest business functionalities and strategies. These plugins will have a huge beneficial impact on your platform during scaling, enhancing and changing. Implementing and creating these versatile plugins, however, makes the existence of developer-friendliness highly desirable in a CMS.

Drupal - Facilitates complex integration and coding (Focus: Drupal 8)

Increasingly, enterprises are finding it necessary to adopt dedicated applications for highly specialized domain functions.  Thus, enterprise platforms need to integrate seamlessly with other paid or open source specialized applications. Yet, integrating third party applications can often be a complicated task. Drupal’s developer oriented structured coding is planned to accommodate the most complicated of integration requirements.

Drupal is soon releasing its latest version to integrate with Symfony, a coding-focussed content management framework that offers a great programming structure for integrating other apps. What does this translate to for your business goals? Well, the Drupal experts you hire will have more numerous and complex options for coding and integration with vital business applications meeting your highly specialized domain requirements.  This means they can materialize your most complex requirements and provide you even more options than before. Your business domain-specific needs will get met and even strategized in a way more aligned to enhance revenue and brand presence. You will be able to stand out from the competition, interest clients, and grow in a way that produces the results you want though such growth. All through an expertly strategized and built enterprise platform that remains leading-edge throughout.

Necessary enterprise requirement - Drupal expertise across versions

As already discussed, the integration of Symfony with Drupal 8 will make more intricate coding options available that will directly translate into increased efficiency, enhancement and innovation for your revenue and branding efforts. So, now’s the time to ensure you hire the right firm for a carefully thought out advanced and holistic Drupal solution.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us at info@valuebound.com

Valuebound Interactive Solutions is happy to share the Drupal 7 version of the Profile Enforcer module with the Drupal community. This release was thought necessary for the community as the Profile Enforcer module fulfills a very commonly encountered requirement that specified users of a site be allowed to access certain site pages only if they make a one-time entry of their profile details. The module has been updated to work with Drupal 7, with enhanced support features to make it more user-friendly.

While an obvious use of the module would be to ensure for instance, that a blogger can post his blog onto a site only if he's filled in his profile details, or that a forum user can open a new thread only if she's entered her name and email ID, the module can be enhanced to add significantly more functionality.

Other immediate uses of this module might be, for instance, if you have a site for brain training games. At the end of level one, the user can access level two only if he fills in certain fields. Or your user is a gold member. He can become a platinum member only if he inputs a value in certain fields.

You're welcome contact us for more information or clarifications on what this ubiquitously required potentially powerful module can do. Do also feel free to contact the expert Valuebound development team for enhanced functionalities you want to achieve through such a module. You can post support issues at https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/profile_enforcer.

Today, let’s discuss why enabling the PHP filter has to be a very very carefully considered decision on a Drupal user’s part. Here’s an example of why you might want to enable the PHP filter that is disabled by default in the Drupal 7 core.

Say, you want to insert the following mix of text, HTML and PHP code (PHP snippet) into the body of a custom block.

Have a great day today!

The date today is:

Now, if you do not enable the PHP filter module, you may find that Drupal 7 prints out your PHP code instead of interpreting it. So, you enable the PHP filter and take some other related measures, and voila, your code goes to your database, and is interpreted exactly the way you want it!

Oh, if it only were that simple!

Unfortunately, adding PHP code in your database by enabling this PHP filter can cause you to get extremely unsafe sitewise. This is one major reason why you should create modules using the API and hooks instead. However, if you absolutely have to add code to your database, you could try to reduce the code to a simple function call. Thus you'd have the function itself in a module (and this would be tracked via SVN). But then you are only a little step from removing the need for the inline code anyway….

Go ahead, though, and make an informed decision based on the following inputs on what could go wrong, and what precautions you can take should you still need to enable this filter in the Drupal 7 core :

Issues due to enabling the PHP filter

Security

PHP code contained inside your database can cause serious security issues. Allowing your CMS to allow execution of PHP can allow hackers to use your server for sending spam, hosting malware, hacking into other sites/databases on your server, and even hack into other servers on the network that might be behind firewalls!

Additionally, if hackers come to know that your site can be used to execute PHP, this alone can make it more likely to be attacked.

In this context, do make sure to check out this rather scary article on how database login details might be hacked from Drupal once PHP Filter module is enabled. Although the article is all about how admins who have ‘misplaced’ their login details might be able to retrieve them, there’s no reason why a hacker should have any scruples about doing such stuff, too.

If you must enable the PHP filter to execute database-included code, be sure to take security measures necessary in such cases. One of the ways you can do this is by limiting users - which is the next issue I’ll discuss --

Limiting Users

After enabling the PHP filter, you might want to restrict the PHP filter to users you can trust. You wouldn’t want the risk of unintentional modifications, or additions to your code, or malicious/unsanctioned activity, would you? So you might want to create roles other than “administrator” for users who you’d like to prevent from accessing / handling database-included PHP code.

Unfortunately, even after limiting your users, any malformed or incorrect coding can not just break your website, but stop its functions altogether. The sad fact is that Drupal experts may not always be expert coders.

Moreover, limiting users might not work if there is a misconfiguration giving people access to a text format, block etc with PHP execution enabled. The misconfiguration cannot cause this sort of damage, though, if the PHP filter is not enabled.

Eval()'d code Problems

Now, database-included code is eval()’d code, which is problematic in more ways than one. For starters, it is much slower than PHP hardcoded in a file. Additionally, it decreases the ability to debug the code by decreasing its readability and creates difficulties in predicting the code path before runtime. This can have security implications that are none too pleasant.

Speaking of debugging, errors in eval()’d codes throw up error messages that don’t provide much help in identifying or locating the error. There’s a good chance you might have to go through your database manually to find and fix the error. Such errors might even be fatal in certain instances, for example, if the error is in a block that is displayed on all pages.

Now, if instead of using the PHP filter, you use a custom module that replaces specific text in the node content with the result of the code it executes (without using eval()), or that appends its own text to the body content of the nodes, any user could then edit the node without permission to add arbitrary PHP code which would be run by the PHP filter. This means you do not have to worry about limiting users, but it still means you do not enable the PHP filter.

Writing and Managing Database-Included Code

If you put php code inside the node body you are creating a big code maintenance problem. Writing and maintaining database-included code is harder because you’re working inside a textfield in your browser. Having your code in a module lets you use an editor/IDE with syntax highlighting, autocomplete and other functions that make coding easier, faster, and more importantly, facilitate increased accuracy. Further, code in your database is much harder to find.

What’s more, database-included code cannot be version controlled. When versions of Drupal change, and your APIs alter as well, you do have to port your code while migrating. If your code is in a module, it can be ported in advance, tested, and only then deployed on the new site. But code inside a node or a block will only work with the Drupal version in which you first created the code.

These then, are a few major reasons why enabling the PHP filter might get you a lot more than you actually wanted, and not all pleasant either. Do feel free to write in with your own views, and tell us what you think of enabling the PHP filter in Drupal.

Reference
drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/2509/

In the dynamic world of web development, Drupal has emerged as a key player in the CMS landscape, despite facing intense competition. As of 2023, Drupal powers 1.1% of all websites and holds a 1.6%  share in the CMS market​​. While this represents a decrease over the years, it’s important to note that Drupal remains a popular choice for high-traffic and complex websites, reflecting its robustness and scalability.

Drupal in Enterprise Solutions

Drupal's versatility and security make it a preferred choice for numerous Fortune 500 companies. In 2022, prominent organizations such as CVS Health, Walgreens, Pfizer, and Tesla, among others, used Drupal for their websites​​. This widespread adoption by major corporations highlights Drupal’s capability to handle diverse enterprise needs.

Community and Ecosystem

The Drupal community is a vital aspect of its success, with thousands of active contributors and a rich ecosystem of modules. This vibrant community is fundamental to Drupal's evolution, providing regular updates, security patches, and innovative solutions.

Drupal 10: A Leap Forward

Released on December 14, 2022, Drupal 10 marks a significant step in Drupal's evolution​​. Key features of Drupal 10 include:

• Olivero Default Theme: Enhancing visual appeal and ease of use, making it easier for developers to create and manage content-rich websites.
   
• Claro Administration Theme: Offering a modern, user-friendly interface for website administration.
  
   
• CKEditor 5: Ensuring a seamless text editing experience with improved functionalities.
• Modern JavaScript Components: Replacing jQuery in many instances, aligning with modern web development practices.
• Theme Starterkit Tools: Simplifying theme creation for developers.
• Symfony 6 Integration: Enhancing backend processing capabilities and support for PHP 8.1.

These improvements reflect Drupal's commitment to staying at the forefront of web technology trends.

Challenges and Future Outlook

Despite its strengths, Drupal faces challenges in a rapidly evolving digital world. The community continues to focus on innovation and addressing emerging needs in web development, ensuring Drupal remains a competitive and reliable choice for enterprises and developers alike.

Conclusion

Drupal's future looks promising, driven by a passionate community and continuous technological advancements. As Drupal 10 ushers in a new era of web development, its role in shaping digital experiences is more crucial than ever. As advocates and contributors to the Drupal community, we at Valuebound are excited about the possibilities Drupal 10 brings and remain committed to its growth and evolution.