Although Drupal is becoming more widespread in the world, unfortunately, it is still not a software that many people have heard of in Turkey. As a team that has been using Drupal for years, providing Drupal services and trying to spread its use, we will introduce Drupal and try to explain why institutions should prefer this software tool in this article.

Drupal in its simplest form is an open source and free content management system.

Content management systems, on the other hand, are software tools that allow users to add, remove, or edit content on a website without the need to know coding.

However, it would be unfair to call Drupal just a content management system.

Drupal offers much more than a content management system with its powerful and flexible structure. With this ingenious software tool, not only websites but also software specific to corporate needs can be developed, at really low costs.

Thanks to its reliability as well as the high performance and speed it offers, it is preferred by many globally recognized institutions and companies that run large operations.

Drupal is used by institutions and companies such as Tesla, Nokia, White House, European Commission, London Municipality, Harvard University, Oxford University, UNICEF, Grammy, NASA, eBay worldwide; and TUBITAK, National Lottery Administration, TÜRKSAT, Yunus Emre Institute, General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre, Sabancı University, TED University, METU, and GnçTurkcell in Turkey.

There are many reasons to choose Drupal. We tried to collect them under 6 main headings for you.

1. Open source and secure

In commercially available and widely used software, data is usually stored on the servers of software providers. However, this creates a security gap for institutions and companies that care about data security.

In addition, if software companies change their data policies in the future, companies and institutions that purchase software have nothing to do but not to use the product anymore in order to protect their data.

Drupal, on the other hand, allows users to store their data on their own servers. Thus, the data is protected within the boundaries of the institutions and companies.

For public institutions and companies that care about information security, it is also important to know roughly how the software works and the processes that take place in the background. Unfortunately, it is not possible to know the background processes and how data is stored in commercially available software (such as Microsoft products).

In addition, once institutions start using these software, they become dependent on the software. Because brands generally only develop software to integrate with their own products.

Drupal is an open source software. The code of open source software is published publicly by developers. This gives users the opportunity to see how the software works in the background, while reducing the dependency on a single brand.

Another advantage of open source software is that it has fewer bugs and vulnerabilities compared to commercially available software.

Because the code is reviewed by so many developers, even minor errors that would normally go unnoticed are noticed. Developers regularly fix bugs and vulnerabilities and make security updates. In addition, since they use the software themselves, they can more easily notice and correct problems encountered during usage.

Drupal also has a large and strong developer community. Its developers are constantly releasing updates for performance and security, improving the user experience while ensuring the security of the software.

One of the reasons the Drupal community is strong is that developers and users are in constant communication over drupal.org. When users encounter any problems, they can find a solution by searching the forum on the site. In case of the occurence of a problem that has not been encountered before, both other users and developers respond in a short time.

2. Flexible

Although Drupal is often used as a content management system for the development of corporate websites, it actually offers much more.

Many processes that need to be managed and followed such as work, production, operations, events and meetings take place during the day in institutions and companies. Various corporate software is used to manage these processes.

Thanks to the flexible structure of Drupal, this type of corporate software can be developed apart from advanced websites.

The core structure of Drupal is designed in such a way that various modules can be integrated into it. In other words, with Drupal, it is possible to develop software that will serve the desired purpose by using existing modules that have been developed so far or by writing new modules specific to needs.

For example, in a software developed with Drupal, all correspondence within the organization can be carried out, while events and projects can be created and processes can be followed. Institutions can receive applications for their events, companies can provide interactive communication with their customers. While the teams working in the field enter the data via mobile applications, productivity calculations can be made at the same time. In addition, in Drupal, user roles with different authorizations can be created in accordance with the authorizations in institutions and companies. There is no restriction on how these authorizations will be arranged, they can be determined entirely according to the structure of the institution.

With Drupal, software for a specific need in institutions and companies can be developed, as well as the integration of existing software in the institution with each other. Thus, various processes such as accounting records, product and operation management, personnel and productivity tracking, and event organization can be monitored and managed from a single environment.

3. High performance

One of the reasons why Drupal is often preferred is the high performance it offers. Thanks to the speed optimization and advanced cache management that Drupal developers are constantly developing, web pages and contents are opened very quickly.

Drupal also enables scalability. In this way, even if the user load of a website or software increases, there is no decrease in its performance. When the correct settings are made, there are no situations such as the site crashing or not opening.

Drupal provides a great advantage in terms of performance, especially for large institutions and companies that have more than one site connected to a domain name. That's why Drupal is preferred by large institutions and companies that have multisites and receive heavy traffic.

For example, TÜBİTAK has many sites connected to a single domain name. While distributing many supports and scholarships in different categories, it constantly organizes competitions. A large number of applications are received for these, and the application processes must proceed without a hitch. TÜBİTAK also prefers Drupal in order to cope with the traffic density brought by all these processes and to prevent problems such as slowdown and freezing of pages.

4. Advanced language support

Today, it is a must for institutions and companies to announce their messages, events or brands worldwide. That's why websites are often prepared in two or more languages. However, this requires a lot of effort and time.

Drupal makes these processes much easier with its multilingual feature. It provides a unique advantage both for institutions and companies with organizations abroad and for institutions and companies at the local level who want to make their voices heard globally.

Thanks to the language support it provides, the menus and contents of the websites or software prepared with Drupal automatically change according to the desired language.

For example, in the Arabic version of a site prepared in Turkish, not only the content but also the design changes. Arabic is written from right to left, while Turkish is written from left to right. Drupal's language support also automatically adjusts for such changes. It also changes the location of the menu and contents in accordance with the structure of the language.

Moreover, this support covers not only certain languages, but also more than a hundred languages. You can visit the website to see the languages ​​that Drupal supports.

5. SEO friendly

Search engines develop optimizations to rank websites in such a way that users get the most benefit, and they rank sites so that those that fit this optimization most appear in the top positions.

For this reason, it is important that websites are prepared in accordance with SEO, that is, search engine optimization, in order for the sites to rank higher in the search results and thus increase their availability.

Drupal facilitates the work of site owners with its SEO-compatible page path naming and modules, helping their websites to rank higher in search engines.

While creating pages, it automatically creates the page path according to the content. Thus, the pages have user-friendly addresses recognized by search engines such as /about us/headquarters or /our services/consulting instead of addresses such as /node/43773478.

Drupal provides the possibility to redirect the page to another page path specified by the site owner or to an external link when a page path is not found. Thus, when the page path of a site is changed or deleted, users are directed to the specified page instead of getting a "404 - Page not found" error. Since there is no page that cannot be found in this way, the rankings of the sites in the search engines do not decrease.

In addition, although it is not as popular as before for SEO, the metadata tagging called "meta tag", which still maintains its importance, can be easily done in Drupal. With the Google Analytics module offered by Drupal, search engine optimization results can be easily monitored.

Drupal has many more modules for SEO. You can visit the Search Engine Optimization Modules page to get information about these modules.

Another important point about SEO is the preparation of websites as mobile-friendly. Today, many users carry out their transactions on smartphones instead of computers. Drupal also offers mobile compatibility feature accordingly.

Thus, users can view the contents in a smooth and easy-to-read way on both mobile devices, tablets and computer screens of all sizes. This feature, which is very important for search engines, increases the ranking of websites in search results.

6. Low cost

We have said before that Drupal is an open source and free software. Even just being free, it provides a serious cost advantage to public institutions, NGOs and companies.

Although it varies according to the size of the institution or company, it is sufficient for institutions and companies that are not large-scale to employ a staff who knows how to use Drupal. Institutions and companies that do not want to make a long-term investment in a staff only for the use of Drupal can choose to employ temporary project-based staff. However, short-term methods do not offer a complete solution since software and websites constantly require maintenance and updates.

For the development of a corporate software or website with Drupal, the most preferred method is to get services from software companies.

Since Drupal offers ready-to-use modules that speed up the code writing processes, it simplifies the work of the software developers and shortens the product delivery time. Software companies also offer maintenance and support services after product delivery. Thus, Drupal solutions are less costly in terms of both cost and time compared to other software services that can be purchased.

In addition, with its easy use, it continues to save labor and time for institutions and companies after service procurement.

So far, we have tried to explain why you should use Drupal in your organization.

To summarize briefly, we can say for Drupal, a software tool that:

• is reliable,
• will eliminate your dependence on closed source software,
• is low cost as well as easy-to-use and high performance
• enables you to develop websites or corporate software tailored to your needs.

If you want to use this effective software tool, which we think every institution and company should benefit from, or if you just want to learn more about Drupal, you can contact us without any hesitation.