Key Components of a Drupal Website

How do you start a Drupal project? What are its requirements? And how do you make use of the extensions and add-on modules? These are just some of the questions that we are going to look at in this article.

Technically speaking, a Drupal project should kick-start with thorough planning. This means getting to know various aspects of what you would need in making the website and where to get them from. Familiarity with the basics of Drupal is a necessity.

The task of organizing the ingredients is much clearer with a vision of who ultimately is going to use the site and which segment of users would interact with the site most frequently. With a basic idea of content organization and the role of Drupal taxonomy in organizing it, the task is much easier.

Once the scope of the project has been decided, issues relating to project time, budgeting, critical decision making, time framing, and other such components would automatically fall into place.

Of the many things that you need to do before you start off your project is download the official core files of Drupal. The core files are a mix of various themes and modules that are essential in building a planned website.

The various installation profiles that facilitate a quick and easy and set up of core Drupal along with the contributed themes, modules, (and configuration) can be downloaded in one shot. The profiles can be tailored to suit specific user requirements on a need basis. If you find the Drupal library not having a specific module that suits your purpose, you have the freedom of creating a module and contributing it to the Drupal community.

The add-on modules let you extend or build the core functionalities of drupal. The add-on modules, run the risk of not functioning properly since they are not part of the core files.

The next ingredient for a good Drupal site would be drupal themes, which helps give a site the desired look and feel. Before you download the themes, do ensure that these themes are compatible with the Drupal version you use. For instance, the themes released for version 5 might not work for version 6. A complete index of themes can be downloaded from the official Drupal site. You can always take the help of theme engines to control the interaction between the themes and Drupal.

 

The Ultimate CMS Race: Drupal vs. Joomla vs. WordPress

What are the Content Management Systems (CMS) of today’s trend? Obviously, even blind-folded the answer would be these 3:  Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. But which one is the best- well, that’s not so easy to answer.

These 3 CMS are actually pretty much alike. Say for instance- Open Source, functions to publish and manage content and the best part is all 3 are based on the same technique, namely PHP and MySQL.

Similarities & Difference Between the Three CMS

Drupal

Popularly known to be developer’s desire around the world and in fact Drupal is now a widely used platform in the USA, the UK and Belgium. Besides versatility, its stability and scalability allows large organizations such as NASA, Holland Casino, RTL News, The White House and Harvard to choose Drupal.

• Best used for Corporate, Magazine, Community and Intranet websites.

• Least suitable for a simple blogs and small websites as it might be a little overkill. Not recommended for beginners since learning all these features takes time to learn.

WordPress

Actually started as a blog system, the biggest advantage of this CMS over others is that you can have a WordPress blog or website online within minutes and start working with it right away.

• Best suitable for Blog websites and magazine websites

• Least suitable for Ecommerce Website, and websites in which different roles are to be linked. Say, a community website, intranet, extranet and customer portal).

Joomla

Being the oldest CMS than WordPress and Drupal, there are experienced developers and community for Joomla. The latest version CMS 3 has a lot of features like multi-language, auto-update, more options giving rights to specific users, a modern way of updating and all these features are made in small updates.

• Best suitable for Government websites, corporate website and magazine websites for more stability

• Least suitable for Personal websites and blogs that doesn’t need all the advanced features and complicated interface of Joomla.

Summing up, Drupal CMS is strictly for those entrepreneurs expecting a well-off site with the most advanced security.  If you want to have a blog in no-time, wordpress would be enough. Everything else, say a stable blog or website with zero errors for a long run without advanced themes and plugins then Joomla is the best choice.

 

Adaptability Comparison for CMS: Joomla vs. WordPress vs. Drupal

There are literally thousands of CMS’s out there but the most common ones in today’s market are Drupal, Joomla and WordPress.

This article will focus on these popular systems to help you decide which one would best suit your needs?

Keep Hand-Coding Under the Hood

A successful web design and development project inclines to write clean code and to identify the interactions between languages like HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript. These approaches enhance comprehension of what code standards mean and how to implement them effectively.

Keep hand-coding and thoroughly enjoy it.

Joomla Content Management System

Forked from Mambo, Joomla is open-source content management software and boasts over 30m downloads to date. Originally designed as an enterprise-grade CMS, this makes it far more capable at handling a large volume of articles than WordPress.  It powers such noteworthy sites as Cloud.com, Linux.com, etc.

However, it falls back in one factor: The learning curve isn’t steep and if you’re not familiar with the software you can’t jump right into a Joomla installation and start hammering.

WordPress Content Management System

WordPress is the world’s favourite blogging software making way for more than 68 million websites. It is flexible enough to power fortune 500 company blogs as well as sporadically updated personal journals.

But honestly, the trick is to find that CMS that would fulfil as many goals as possible because looking towards the future- well, WordPress simply was not designed for that.

Drupal Content Management System

Drupal is open-source and based on PHP-MySQL which is why it seems extremely powerful and developer-friendly. It is why feature rich, data-intensive websites like Whitehouse.gov and Data.gov.uk are based on this solid platform. Its strong versions are designed from the ground-up to be search engine friendly.

Bt then, unless you have strong coding capabilities moving to Drupal is extremely a high risk.

As a bottom line, it’s essential to have the ability to create a site appropriate for a client’s needs, say creativity and responsiveness. If you could find the best professional developers, then Drupal may be the best overall solution for a website framework that assures security and online visibility.

 

Drupal – An Ideal Choice for Building Content-Focused Websites

Embellished with a number of features and enhanced functionalities, Drupal has gained rapid popularity among the web developers and website owners alike. It is said that identifying the sites that built using this platform is quite easy.

Besides, its exclusive themes and design, the in-built content management features has made this incredible tool the topmost choice among the individuals who want to create the sites that entirely focus on the content part.

Designing Content-Focused Websites

Every website has two fundamental components: Information and Users/ Readers.

Content-focused websites are those which provide regularly updated topical content. So, “what information does it provide?” Everything from Blogging sites and other news-oriented websites like Wikipedia, including online magazines, newspapers and live journals where user-user interact in comments, fall into this category.

The key to designing a good content-focused website is firstly, estimating your readers’ preferences? Secondly, you just serve up content according to that estimate.

Why Developers Consider Drupal As an Ideal Choice?

Drupal enables you to build really astonishing content-oriented websites. Here are some of its incredible features for content-focused websites.

Menu Management: Web programmers use this feature to include smooth navigation within the pages.

Content Creation: Drupal simplifies the task of forming the content using an admin login and selecting ‘Create Content’ option in the main menu.

Default Home Page: The admin menu of Drupal consists of “Site Configuration” section that enables you to set the default home page within the site itself.

Navigation Menu: With drupal website development, there is an option of placing the primary links at the top and the navigation links at the bottom left-side of each web page. Its menu management feature incorporates navigation menu that consists of ‘Administrator’ menu that lets developers to access Menu Manager with complete flexibility.

To achieve the best of its kind benefits, hire professional Drupal developers from a reliable web development company that offers high-quality services at affordable rates.

 

10 Reasons Why Leading Companies These Days Prefer Drupal

Leading companies generally go for Drupal web development instead of other technologies as it has so many advantages as compared to other technologies.

Here we present why a Web Development Company NYC should built projects using Drupal.

Why Website To Be Built Using Drupal?

Opensource with No Licensing

Very quick to set up, Drupal is an open source system and therefore you do not need to worry about any licensing or contracts when you build a website.

Extensibility and Modularity

Drupal offers thousands of modules that can be very easily customized. Another aspect of it is that the theme layer is separate from content and functionality, means changing the visual appearance of Drupal website is quite easy.

Scalability

Drupal has got many optimization tools. It handles websites with over million pages and 20,000+ requests per second.

Security

Being open source, thousands of volunteers ensure that the security aspects are taken care from being attacked by malicious sources. And, if found any, they fix the security holes and release patch fixes ensuring that the websites are safe.

High-Performance

Its in-built caching system further supported by community ensures high performance. Coupled with features such as database, caching and web services, Custom Ecommerce Development on Drupal provide solid infrastructure for faster performance.

Large Community

Truly one of the largest international communities with nearly thousand people contributed to the release of Drupal 7. Besides, every day people work on add-on modules, security scanning and oversight and also documentation.

User Management

Drupal allows multiple users with different roles to work on the website simultaneously without causing any issues with content on the site- even for users who are not very technically savvy.

Third Party Integrations

Leveraging third party applications such as XML, RPC, SOAP, REST or JSON, Drupal Web Development supports many authentication and authorization schemes.

Search Engine Friendly

Features such as custom URL, URL controls, options for global 301 redirect, tags including title tags, meta tags, and alt tags optimization- all make Drupal websites search engine friendly.

Commercial Support

Having one of the largest communities of open source developers, today thousands of companies are building and supporting Drupal websites. There are feature-specialized commercial firms which offer very specific Drupal development support.

 

Drupal CMS to Improvise Web Accessibility in Higher Education

Drupal Web Development

Since a decade or so, website development is considered the only solution to enhance online businesses. However, in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1998, most institutions have been working to insure that their web accessibility adheres to the standards and protocols. But despite this history, web accessibility in higher education remains top-of-mind and comes up in every day conversations.

Scope of Web Accessibility in Colleges and University
Many institutions, including colleges and universities, drive more and more communication and engagement through the web. Means, ultimately there is a greater dependence on digital platforms to serve an entirety of needs. But 20% of all Americans dealing with disabilities make web navigation a challenge.

How can colleges and universities continue to use the web to drive their business goals while at the same time meeting the needs of their entire community? Of course there’s a carrot and a stick component to this challenge i.e. to solve the problem successfully. And the answer is Drupal Content Management System when it comes to web accessibility.

Drupal Website Development to Support Accessibility
Drupal is a “modern” Content Management System that is conceived well after the first Section 508 requirements were developed. Evolved during a time when “accessibility-first”, it has become the norm for web design and web development companies.

Being a standard CMS, Drupal Website Development is formulated for the highest levels of the federal government (whitehouse.gov, education.gov, etc).

The biggest strength of Drupal include

myriad of available resources to help you, from full subject matter overviews in a higher education setting, to helpful white papers, and even “how-to” webinars.

Also, the Drupal community lets Website developers take a quick search on Drupal.org or DrupalModules.com to find several modules that have been contributed to set up, audit, and manage your Drupal website for accessibility.

Openwave Computing services, a complete solution for web design and development is located in the New York City, USA. We extend our services for all types of online business projects branching to Web Portal Development and web app development.

 

Drupal CMS for Customized Web Design

Hundreds of open source content management systems are found on the Internet today. But still why would anyone be interested to design their business website, especially online store using a custom CMS?

Here is the answer.

Why Use a Custom Content Management System?

Even if you were a small business, you run the store to grow in business eventually? Isn’t it? This is why a custom CMS is recommended where you’d be getting way more than you might be using. Moreover, you’d be paying to re-invent the wheel for all the functionality of a brochure-ware site. Instead, use that budget towards differentiating yourself on design and search engine marketing.

Whether ecommerce or informational, it requires more work than your typical website. In ecommerce website development is implemented with a very rigid set of requirements for high performance, responsive and search engine optimization capabilities. Despite spending time on bending another CMS into working how you want it and to function at the level of performance required would give you a sub-par product and often takes longer than building it from scratch.

Drupal Content Management System

Drupal Content Management System

A custom CMS allows you to build a site that matches your business, workflow and needs. This way user gets content-rich and relevant results with a superior user experience. It should be said that Drupal or Joomla can’t afford it without significant development resources.

The most interesting part of all this… With Drupal Website Development, it is possible to build customized shopping cart with some custom design and hardcore SEO work to make it show even better. Also, it serves the best for high-performance, good-looking and exciting websites, as YOU need it.

Openwave Computing Services, one of its kind web development company, NYC offers a wide variety of affordable custom web design and web development services, primarily focused on the Drupal website development but also branching to consulting, project management, contracting, web hosting, graphic design and rebranding and strive to produce standards-compliant websites that are both elegant and functionally solid.

 

Why Should I Upgrade My Drupal Website to Version 7?

Unlike many proprietary software products that require mandatory upgrades, Drupal is open source content management system. If you are running Drupal 4 site you are responsible for the security updates and developing anything new is pretty unproductive since you need to do a lot of coding.

If you’re interested in upgrading and looking for reasons to persuade decisions makers, below is a list of the top reasons,

Responsive Template: If you’re looking to implement a new theme using responsive design technique it will be much simpler to do in Drupa7 than in D6 due to the outdated version of jQuery and other resources.

Backend Interface: Changes include a new administration theme, inline administration links, reorganisation of the menu system, drag and drop tactic, inclusion of the Vertical Tabs module and a new administration toolbar.

Workflow Capability: Managing content in Drupal Workbench provides improvements that include a simplified UI for content editors and a customizable editorial workflow that integrates with access control permissions. Great if you have a large team of editors.

Web Technologies

RDFa which is an extension to HTML5 for your Ecommerce website helps you markup things like People, locations, Events, and Reviews. And, search engines and web services use this markup to generate better search listings and give you better visibility.

Flexible Database Layer

with a fully Object Orientated database layer Drupal 7 improves on D6 that provides the ability to support multiple database types at once, master/slave replication support, transaction support, database specific optimisations and improved database portability. Sure, an enhanced flexibility to web developers.

Development Process on each successive version of Drupal has become more efficient. And that’s why “Now” is the optimal time to upgrade so you can take advantage of the efficiencies gained from Drupal 7.

For more information, please visit us @ Drupal Web Development