Why Drupal?

With hundreds of content management systems available, why did I decide to build this site on Drupal? The reasons include both the technical software engineering aspects of Drupal, as well as the community and businesses that have grown up around this open source platform.

From a software engineering perspective, Drupal does an excellent job of adhering to key concepts of abstraction and modularity. Drupal's layers of abstraction allows me (and others) to avoid worrying about the details of its underlying structure, though I can access it and modify it as needed. Instead, I can think in terms of my community in terms of users, roles, and permissions, and can think of the site content in terms of documents, images, and so on.

Modularity is even more important. Drupal's design adheres to several concepts of modularity. The first allows users to add capabilities as needed, both from the basic set of services and from user-contributed add-on modules. Similarly, it is straightforward to swap out a module and replace it with another. For example, Commonplaces has built a search module using Lucene. Themes are evolving in the same direction, with lots of theme choices (both contributed and commercially sold) to replace the basic choices. Thus, I've started with a basic structure, but immediately selected a contributed theme (Marinelli), which I tweaked by substituting some of my own photos for the [very nice] default set. It's almost trivial to change to another one.

The large number of contributed modules and themes is a strong indication of the growing community around Drupal, as is the growing capability and stability of the Drupal Core. The Drupal community is supported by the main Drupal site with its documentation and forums, the Drupal Association, the twice-yearly Drupalcons, and a large number of local Drupal user groups. There are also books aimed at both Drupal developers and users.

For most of us, those factors alone are more than enough to choose Drupal. However, many businesses also consider commercial support and training in their decision-making process. Drupal has now evolved to the point that businesses can purchase professional support for Drupal, as well as Drupal hosting, training courses, and custom site design and development. Last, but not least, there are some very solid Drupal sites in use by widely recognized companies, notably Time-Warner Music.

From a corporate perspective, all of these factors contribute to make Drupal a "safe" choice for content management, without the license fees or the proprietary code of most commercial content management systems. From an entrepreneurial perspective, it has become feasible to build a business around the design, development, hosting, and support of Drupal-based sites. Dozens of such firms have already emerged, covering many different aspects of the Drupal ecosystem.

The Drupal project, for its part, still has a lot of work ahead. The development, testing, release, and transition effort to Drupal 7 is a major undertaking. It will certainly be a lengthy process for people, projects, modules, and themes to make the migration, especially with all of the changes envisioned. While there is now an extensive testing process in place for Drupal Core, that's not the case for the contributed modules. Many of those modules are written by inexperienced programmers and don't measure up in code quality, stability, or performance to the core modules. It's quite difficult for a user to select high-quality modules from the thousands of possibilities. The current informal rating system is of some help, but that may need to be augmented by a process that reviews and certifies some of these contributed modules. Much the same is true for themes.

All in all, though, it now seems likely that Drupal will be around for a long time, and that it will become fairly easy to find people and organizations with Drupal expertise as needed. All of these factors make me confident that I have made a sound choice in selecting Drupal.