TopNotchThemes Drupal Themes

Why Drupal?

Drupal is a content management system (CMS) that you can use to create dynamic websites and web applications. Instead of using individual hand-crafted files for each web page, Drupal stores your content in a database and then creates each page on the fly as a link is clicked.

This allows you to create incredibly feature-rich websites, with features like:

comments
user profiles
blogs
image galleries
forms
multimedia
document management
discussion forums
advanced searching
games
social networking
content tagging
e-commerce shopping carts

A CMS puts you in control and allows for much better management of content, allowing you to focus on your business or organization, or to do things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

Why Drupal?

Drupal isn’t the only CMS out there – far from it! There are countless others, ranging from simple blog applications to enterprise level solutions. They range from free, and open source (meaning you can see and edit the code that runs the CMS) to six-figure, hosted or licensed solutions. Drupal is free (no cost) and open source. It is coded using the programming language, PHP.

Drupal out of the box (often referred to as “core”) does a lot – forums, blogs, organization of content using categories or tags, file uploads, user profiles, searching, and so on – but its real strength lies in the thousands of developers who create and share modules that extend Drupal’s functionality.

There’s a dirty little secret that Drupal is a “developer’s CMS”. People have often pointed this out as one of its weaknesses – we beg to differ. Usability for average users is a key goal of Drupal. Happy coders means more code, more support, and higher quality. These are people who are passionate about Drupal and want it to succeed. This makes your Drupal website stronger every day.

A few more things we love (that we think you’ll love too):

Drupal has a great support community, with very active forums, chat support, and a welcoming vibe
Drupal has amazing leaders
Drupal is strong and cohesive
Drupal is constantly improving, with regular new releases and active development
Drupal is great in particular for multilingual websites, building hyper-dynamic websites that go beyond a basic blog or community site, e-commerce, and complex user permissions or workflow

The DIYer’s CMS

We love tinkering around in Drupal and we think you will too. Yes, there’s a lot there. It can take a while to get your head around it all. If you have a bit of time and the inclination, you can install Drupal, configure it to your needs (maybe by installing some contributed modules too), and get your site up and running all on your own.

There’s a lot of clicking involved. The theme is the hardest thing for most people, since it involves actually getting into the code if you want to make changes. And hey, that’s where we come in!

Expandable and flexible

Modules are often what people really fall in love with when getting started with Drupal. Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be a module to do exactly what you need, bam! There it is.

The hardest thing a site builder usually has to do, after creating/customizing a theme, is figuring out the right recipe to get their Drupal site doing what they want. Want to create advanced user profiles for your social networking site? There are a few different approaches you can take. Want a community news site that pulls in RSS feeds and has landing pages of content topics? Lots of ways to do that. Want an image gallery? Dozens!

There is often no one right way – it just takes a while to get to know the modules and formulas out there to make things happen. But you will find that almost nothing is impossible in Drupal, even without writing a line of code!

Want some examples? With Drupal, you can…

* Note: Some of these links are slightly outdated in terms of versions of Drupal/modules, so the step-by-step might be a little different — but the general principles are the same.