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As a website grows larger and more complex, many webmasters discover that static HTML pages make it much harder to update and keep track of the content it contains.  At the same time, several webmasters assume that keeping up with a dynamic site is such a challenge that it can only be maintained by technical geniuses.  This is especially true if you own a large site with a lot of content.  Although managing such a site requires some level of skill, the curve of complexity can be shortened significantly with a software package like the Drupal CMS.

A CMS (content management system) is a specialize piece of software that allows you to efficiently maintain and update all the contents of your website.  Drupal is one of the very best at this, offering tremendous out of the box functionality along with support for a number of additional modules that can be used to extend its default capabilities.  Being an open-source software application, a community of users have contributed many components and modules for the overall betterment of the project.

Easy to Install and Set Up

Installing Drupal on your web hosting account is simple, especially when using an easy to use application installer such as Fantastico.  After installing the program, you can go through the process of designing your site and select from the array of content types that it will be compromised of.  A comprehensive wizard is available to walk you through the entire process and when setting things up, you are able to see a preview of what your site will look like when it is done.  This gives you the luxury to go back and make edits at any point during the design process.  Learning how to master the basic functions and options of Drupal is something that can literally be done in a matter of minutes.

The Benefits of Drupal Hosting

Due to its soaring popularity, Drupal has become a mainstay on the hosting market as several hosts now offer the software in their service plans at no additional cost.  Even though it has a reputation for being more complex than similar packages such as Joomla, all it takes is a basic level of technical skills to create a powerful and professional Drupal site.  In fact, if you can work with a simple word processing application and web browser, you can excel from the default functionality this dynamic CMS has to offer.  Drupal requires no programming knowledge of PHP or HTML to either create, maintain or update your website.

Conclusion

Drupal is a robust software package that offers the ability to create, manage and update various types of content.  It is primed for Web 2.0 applications so you can easily implement desirable features such blogs, forums and much more.  There are many CMS hosting solutions on the market and honestly, Drupal may not be suited for your needs.  For this reason, you should evaluate this product in and out to determine if it can meet your content management requirements.

When it comes to open-source content management systems, they just don’t get any better than Drupal.  This award-winning CMS has been responsible for creating a number of sites including those powered by The Discovery Channel, The New York Observer and Yahoo.  If you’re considering open-source solutions, this article will give you seven reasons why Drupal makes the best choice.

1. Search Engine Friendly – Drupal offers enhanced control over URL structure, making this CMS search engine friendly right out of the box.  Each piece of content can become customized with clean URLs that better your chances of ranking well in the search engines.

2.  Custom Content - The CCK (Content Construction Kit) in Drupal allows you to easily create various types of content.  Common examples include news stories, blog posts and tutorials.  With the Views Modules feature, you can display these content types in numerous ways.  While the average CMS requires complex coding to enable these tasks, Drupal makes it all simple as no programming experience is required.

3. Revision Control – Drupal allows you to save new versions of your web pages every time they are edited.  This gives you the ability to revert back to your old versions at any time.

4. Advanced Categorization – Drupal’s taxonomy system lets you organize and tag content with ease.  Known as vocabularies, each set of categories can be organized as certain types of content.  For instance, you could have blog content that permits free tagging while other sections can be limited to different list of categories.  When combined with the CCK and View Modules feature, this functionality makes it easy to target keywords you want to implement into your site.

5. User Management - The Drupal CMS was designed to support community-based sites, proven by the enhanced user and access control functionality it offers.  There are no limits to the user roles and access levels you can create and customize.  The best thing about Drupal is that it lets you keep advanced management features disabled and then enable them when your site grows and requires more community features.

6. PHP-based – By default, Drupal uses a PHP template theme engine, allowing you to instantly enhance the presentation of your site.  Applying themes in Drupal is easier than the WordPress environment and as long as the they are completely scripted, you don’t have to know anything about PHP to install them.

7. Excellent Community Support – Of all open-source content management systems, Drupal has one of the largest and most active communities.  You will understand how well supported the CMS is when taking a look at the long scroll of modules that have been contributed to the project.  There are many ways to get support including Drupal forums along with a number of video tutorials, podcasts and online documentation.  Drupal’s popularity gives you the assurance that this CMS will be around for a long time.

Joomla is highly functional yet lacks out of the box search engine friendliness.  WordPress is easy to use but can’t handle larger websites.  Where these systems and other platforms fail, Drupal picks up the slack with instant functionality able to satisfy a wide range of needs.

Source: http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2009/02/11/top-7-reasons-to-drupal/