According to a recent study, 48% of people believe website design is the leading factor in a company’s credibility. Based on this assumption, it’s clear that having a professional website is incredibly important. With content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, it can seem like hiring a leading web agency is unnecessary. However, agencies like Bluetext offer the expertise of top drupal consultants, WordPress design experts, and countless other web specialists to create a seamless, designed to spec, website. Needless to say, hiring a leading web agency is essential to your website development journey. Read our top 5 reasons to hire a web agency:  

No Training Required

By hiring an agency, the added stress of finding, hiring, and onboarding new employees is eliminated. Often times, companies invest countless time, money, and energy to help train new employees, just to have them leave within a few years. By hiring a leading web agency,  clients get a qualified and accomplished team ready to start working from day one and for years to come.

Work Directly with Experts

Agencies bring talent who have extensive knowledge and experience in different areas of web design. Unlike many businesses, agencies have access to a wide array of specialists like SEO experts, designers, researchers, and everyone in between. These experts can use their in-depth knowledge to help generate and report on results, guaranteeing the success of any website design and development project.

Get Access to the Latest Technology

Analytics and web development tools are costly to use for large and small businesses alike. With so many possibilities on the market, training employees to use these tools adds an unnecessary cost to any business. Working with a leading web agency can help increase efficiency and performance by gaining access to the latest tools, services, and software in the industry.

Outside Perspective

Employees within a company often find it hard to bring completely new ideas or concepts to the table. By hiring a leading web agency to help with web design, businesses get a fresh set of eyes and a unique perspective. Not to mention, agencies bring experience and data-driven results that show what works and what doesn’t to help meet the goals of businesses in any industry.

Positive Results

Agencies are constantly building and maintaining many different types of websites. From prior experience, a leading web agency will know from the very start what a website requires to generate quality results. Additionally, an agency can continue to update websites to ensure the best tools and assets are in place for long-term growth and success.

Hiring a web agency has many benefits for any business. It’s important to hire an agency that can help you meet all of your goals so your business can work more efficiently. Whether it’s to save time and money or to take advantage of the latest tricks and tools, there are countless reasons to hire a leading web agency.

If you’re looking to hire a leading web agency, see what Bluetext can do for you today. To learn more about our processes and to see our work, check out our website.

As we near the end of 2019, choosing the right technology implementation partner has never been more important. According to a recent Gartner study, through 2021, 90 percent of global organizations will rely on system integrators (SIs), UX design agencies and channel partners to design, build and implement their digital experience strategies.

Before deciding on the right implementation partner, it’s integral to choose the right technology for that partner to implement. Drupal, an open-source technology option, is known for being the top choice for creating large, complex websites. Given today’s increasingly complex threat environment, Drupal is also a great technology option because of its built-in security protocols. According to a recent report, Drupal sites are some of the least hacked sites on the web. For large, security-conscious organizations, federal agencies and government institutions, look no further than Drupal. 

Once you’ve made the decision to implement a Drupal site, the next question to ask yourself is who you should trust to design, build and implement your new site. That’s where a top DC UX design agency like Bluetext comes in. 

Here are our top 5 tips for finding the right Drupal development agency:

Look for a Partner Who Thinks Beyond the Implementation

Having a partner who focuses on the big picture of your project is integral to the success of your initiative. These days, any developer with a laptop and an internet connection can set up a website, but having a partner with a perspective on how that website fits into the broader marketing ecosystem and vision for your company’s future growth is paramount. A Drupal development company like Bluetext, with full-service capabilities, can be that partner. Bluetext, leveraging experience as a top DC UX design agency, will assess the project from a wider viewpoint and offer tried and tested solutions to positively impact your revenue streams and improve overall customer loyalty. 

For example, Bluetext partnered with Mindtree to develop the new Mindtree.com, which includes an intuitive, fully responsive user experience and leverages personalization to serve relevant content to each user. Powered by Drupal 8, the new website provides the flexibility and scalability a large enterprise needs to support its digital marketing efforts.

Is Your Team Ready for the Partner’s Style?

When working on a project, chemistry is everything. Your chosen partner might be the best in the business, but if they don’t wrap their processes around your needs, the entire engagement will be negatively affected on both sides of the table. Deadlines won’t be met, communication will feel forced and restricted, and overall, the project will suffer.  Bluetext, one of the best DC UX design agencies, works closely with each client we partner with, making sure we understand internal processes, all design and functional requirements, and priorities for the given timeframe. Bluetext adapts our processes to operate how our clients work best, employing different applications and modes of communication to ensure every client is happy and the end-product achieves set goals.

Make Sure Your Teams Fully Understand Their Roles

The key to any project’s success is communication. It is never wise to assume a member of the team fully understands the objectives they are tasked to manage and deliver. An open-source application such as Drupal can be a challenging system to get used to. Having a leading web agency like Bluetext on your side can make any project run smoothly. From week one, Bluetext makes sure every member of the team, on both sides of the engagement, has a clear understanding of their role. This means putting in the effort to define clear project objectives per phase, roles and responsibilities, a communication structure and even informal expectations. Put the work in at the beginning of an engagement, and you will reap the benefits as you toast the launch of your new website.

A Higher Price Doesn’t Necessarily Mean a Higher Quality

When choosing the right technology implementation partner, the cost of the implementation is important. Understanding how and where your budget will be spent before making your choice will lower the chance of setbacks as the project moves from start to finish. The higher-priced implementation partner will often spend longer amount of time on a project and will bring too many unnecessary team members to meetings. Contrarily, the cheaper implementation partners often lack the skill to produce consistent, quality work. 

At Bluetext, a leading web agency, we understand how ambiguous pricing may seem when it comes to implementing a new website. Bluetext is unique in our approach to pricing out technological implementations. Most digital web design agencies will conduct their business via an hourly billing budget. Bluetext ultimately views this process as inefficient and a hindrance to the client-agency relationship. Instead, we bill per deliverable, making our inefficiencies our problem. It doesn’t matter how many members of our team we bring to a client meeting or how many rounds of revisions a design takes to get right. The client always comes first and the work isn’t done until you are satisfied.

Past Track Record Counts

A company’s decision on which technology implementation partner to choose comes down to that partner’s previous experience. This makes sense, given that clients often look to case studies featuring previously executed work an example of what they can expect to receive at the end of the engagement. They also look to the reputation of agencies within their industry, so they know that that agency has knowledge of their industry and can get up to speed quickly. Bluetext, being a top UX & interface design company, has plenty of experience developing stunning, industry-leading, Drupal-based sites and has delivered on some of the most complex implementations to date.

For example, Bluetext partnered with XO on an enterprise-level Drupal 8 website deployment. Bluetext engineered a next-generation CMS re-platforming that included a first-time responsive website user-experience design. As XO’s SEO agency of record, Bluetext delivered a comprehensive SEO overlay as we dealt with the complexities of re-platforming, leveraging the Drupal content management capabilities to make XO.com an organic SEO over-achiever.

For more information on why Bluetext is one of the top DC digital web design agencies, check out our website, packed with examples of our work harnessing the power of Drupal.

As we recently wrote, Bluetext has been selected as a finalist for the 2018 Acquia Engage Awards in the category of “Lightning in a Bottle”. The Acquia Engage Awards recognize the world-class digital experiences that organizations are building with the Acquia Platform.

More than 100 submissions were received from Acquia customers and partners, from which 43 were selected as finalists. Nominations that demonstrated an advanced level functionality, integration, performance (results and key performance indicators), and overall user experience advanced to the finalist round, where an outside panel of experts will select the winning projects.

A sneak peak of the project:

As a leader in technology services and digital transformation, Mindtree must not only provide a website as a sales tool, but also act as a testament to the brand and its mission. In April 2017, Mindtree approached Bluetext with the goal of reimagining, redesigning, and re-platforming its self-hosted Drupal 7 website, with 10 unique page templates, 1800+ pages, and 700+ blogs in under six months. Mindtree, in partnership with Bluetext and Acquia, was able to achieve a complete digital transformation and launch a scalable digital platform in less than 6 months through the strategic partnership.

The Acquia Platform provided tremendous value for operationalizing the development workflow to gain efficiencies. When paired with Acquia’s Build and Launch Tool and Acquia Lightning, it takes the time savings to a new level. Acquia Lightning provides a starter kit that is geared towards content editing and workflow.

More information about the Awards:

Winners will be announced on October 24, 2018, ahead of this year’s Acquia Engage Conference, which will be held in Austin, Texas, from November 7-9, 2018.

“Acquia partners and customers are tackling the biggest challenges facing marketers, developers, and digital teams,” said Joe Wykes, senior vice president, global channels and commerce at Acquia. “This year’s Acquia Engage Award nominees show what’s possible when open technology and boundless ambition come together to create elegant, world-class customer experiences. They’re making every customer interaction more meaningful with powerful, personalized experiences that span the web, mobile devices, voice assistants, and more. Their work is inspiring, and we’re proud to recognize their accomplishments.”

The Acquia Experience Platform offers a suite of technologies for easily building digital experiences at scale, across the web, mobile sites, native applications, voice assistants and more. The platform allows businesses to manage the deployment and iteration of those experiences in the cloud, and intelligently optimize how they are tailored for specific audiences using machine learning.  

The full list of finalists for the 2018 Acquia Engage Awards are posted to Acquia’s website.

About Mindtree

Mindtree is a leader in technology services and digital transformation. Mindtree delivers digital transformation and technology services from ideation to execution, enabling Global 2000 clients to outperform the competition. “Born digital,” Mindtree takes an agile, collaborative approach to creating customized solutions across the digital value chain. To learn more, visit mindtree.com

About Acquia

Acquia is the open source digital experience company. Acquia provides the world’s most ambitious brands with technology that allows them to embrace innovation and create customer moments that matter. Acquia believes in the power of community – giving their customers the freedom to build tomorrow on their terms. To learn more, visit acquia.com.

Learn How Bluetext Can Help Your Brand with a Great Platform Experience.

A Public Service Announcement was released on July 30th, 2018, announcing a moderately critical security update to Drupal Core. This update is not part of the normal Drupal Core security releases but was deemed important enough to release the update. A link to the public service announcement can be found here: https://www.drupal.org/psa-2018-07-30

More information on the actual vulnerability was released along with the security updated on August 1, 2018. Based on the feedback and messaging around the issue on other forums such as Acquia.com, it is highly recommended that anyone on Drupal 8.5 install this important update. For organizations not running on the latest version of Drupal 8, it is recommended that you manually upgrade the impacted libraries as soon as possible.

For more information on the Drupal Security Advisories, the Drupal Security Team and Drupal Security Rating Process, check out our previous post here: https://bluetext.com/drupal-8-critical-security-release-march-28th-2018/

Looking for help upgrading your Drupal website? Contact Us!

Drupal 8 has made significant improvements in standardizing its upgrade path. Gone are the days where an upgrade would require a full site rebuild and migration. While some upgrades are more significant than others, the overall standardization of the upgrade process is welcome.

Minor Upgrades:

With minor upgrades beginning with Drupal 8, no functionality will be removed from the core. Any changes to core API’s or functions will be “deprecated” and will be slated for removal during the next major upgrade.

Major Upgrades:

Major upgrades will clear out all of the deprecated functionality that has accumulated in order to start off with a clean slate. With the standardization onto the Symphony framework, there is no plan to rebuild the Drupal core like as was done from versions 6 -> 7 and 7 -> 8.

Great! So upgrading my sites in Drupal 8 should be easy!? Right!???

Answer: Not so much!

The big takeaway is that the Drupal 8 updates made to standardize the upgrade process will make staying up-to-date much easier. That being said, there are still complications with the minor version upgrades. Drupal 8 continues to be in very active development — the community is working hard to integrate critical functionality, such as Media and Workflow, into the Drupal core.

With these core improvements comes a new dilemma: How do I upgrade my website that was built utilizing contributed functionality because the core functionality was not ready at the time? It might sound simple to do, but there are many improvements and alterations made to functionality when it is being integrated into the core. This requires an upgrade path to be built in order to move forward with updating the version of Drupal 8 you are running.

The good news is that Drupal 8 will not release a new core upgrade without an upgrade path for migrating the contributed functionality to the core. The bad news is that this won’t cover customizations or other contributed add-on functionality. This is where the real work comes in and where planning is required.

Here are some high-level questions that will help you plan your core upgrade path:

• What contributed modules that I am using have been moved into the core?
• Which of the patches that I am using has been committed to the core?
• Are there additional dependencies that need to be updated due to core API updates or changes?
• Do I have any custom code that is utilizing deprecated core functions or modules?

Things here can get a little bit more complex based on how your website is built. For example, if you are utilizing features for configuration management you will need to also consider:

• Are my features dependent on configuration from core/contrib that has been updated or removed?
• Do my features contain configuration related to a deprecated module?

While the new upgrade plan for Drupal provides a much clearer path forward, it still requires effort to stay up to date. For many clients, separating a large upgrade into several, smaller chunks is desirable because it is more manageable and allows them to spread the cost of upgrading their entire site over several quarters or years.

Looking for help upgrading your Drupal website? Contact Us!

If you are not already aware, and, more importantly, have not already upgraded, on March 28, a critical security update was released for all versions of the open source Drupal content management system platform. The vulnerability was rated as a 21/25 in severity based on the NIST Common Misuse Scoring System. The vulnerability was described as “(a) remote code execution vulnerability (that) exists within multiple subsystems of Drupal 7.x and 8.x. This potentially allows attackers to exploit multiple attack vectors on a Drupal site, which could result in the site being completely compromised.”  More information can be found here at this link: https://www.drupal.org/sa-core-2018-002

Drupal Security Advisories

Security advisories are posted on the Drupal.org website under the security advisories page. It is important for anyone who is maintaining a Drupal website to regularly check for security advisories that may apply to their websites in order to keep their sites secure. There are several ways to stay up to date with the most recent information:

• Visit the Drupal Security Advisory Page
• Subscribe to the rss feeds for core, contrib, or public service announcements
• Follow @drupalsecurity on Twitter.

Drupal Security Team

One huge selling point of Drupal as a platform is the large community of users. An integral part of this community is the Drupal Security Team, a volunteer team of professionals across the industry who want to help improve the security of Drupal. The goals of the security team are to:

• Resolve reported security issues in a Security Advisory
• Provide assistance for contributed module maintainers in resolving security issues
• Provide documentation on how to write secure code
• Provide documentation on securing your site
• Help the infrastructure team to keep the drupal.org infrastructure secure

For more information about the Drupal Security Team, what they do, and how they do it,  check out their page on Drupal.org.

Drupal Security Rating Process

The security rating of a vulnerability is used to help determine the level of urgency you should take when dealing with a new security advisory. While all security updates should be incorporated, some may not warrant disruption to your business to implement immediately upon release.

Based on the  NIST Common Misuse Scoring System (NISTIR 7864) in which all Drupal security advisories are measured, vulnerabilities are given a rating:

• a score between 0 and 4 is considered Not Critical
• 5 to 9 is considered Less Critical
• 10 to 14 is considered Moderately Critical
• 15 to 19 is considered Critical
• 20 to 25 is considered Highly Critical

Each issue should be assessed individually, but, as a basic rule of thumb, any issue rated as Critical or Highly Critical should be taken care of immediately. Less Critical to Moderately Critical should be fit into the current release if possible, and Non Critical issues can be prioritized against a backlog of updates.

Looking for help upgrading your Drupal website? Contact Us!

Website migration – whether to a new version of your content management system or to an entirely new platform – is among the most stressful projects for an enterprise, one that will challenge the team on every assumption and analytics they have. Before starting down this path to a website migration, there are two key questions you will want to answer:

1. Does automating the process save me time?
2. Does automating the process save me money?

Below is our guide to go about answering these questions. Of course, every scenario is different and requires evaluation and analysis before the final decisions are made.

Determining an Approach

When determining the approach for migrating content, there are several factors that come into play when architecting out a solution to find out which one would be best.

How many pages are there? If your website is relatively simple, and there are a small number of pages (<500), it is likely going to be easier/faster/cheaper to copy/paste your content from one website to another. The number of pages will need to be determined by you, but we have found that migrating sites with more than 500 pages start to become more efficient with migrations scripts.

Importance of Site Crawls. Crawling the existing website is a critical step in determining the approach to take for a website migration. This will give you a quick summary of the volume of pages, images, and documents. Tools like Screaming Frog will allow you to export the list to a spreadsheet where you can create a more thorough inventory and conduct a ROT analysis (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial) on your content to determine how much of this content actually needs to be moved to the new platform.

Where do the current pages live? Is the content that you are migrating in a database somewhere or does it live in static HTML files on a server? Where the content lives is important because it limits the options available for importing and working with the content. It also determines the structure of the content.

Database Content. Content that is stored in a database is typically more structured and logically separated. This gives more flexibility when writing migration scripts because it is already in a consumable format. It is unlikely that this will be an “easy” 1:1 mapping from point A to point B, but the first step of getting the content into a consumable format is done.

Static HTML. Content that is in a static HTML format is going to be harder to work with. In these cases, you will likely need to use a web scraper tool to break apart your pages and get them into a consumable format for your migration to Drupal. You will be faced with numerous edge cases based on how each page is built. This process may require a lot of trial & error in order to get right.

How well are the static pages structured/formatted? In any website migration, consistency is key to making the process effective. You will want to determine if the pages follow consistent patterns so that you can create a repeatable process. If the pages have no uniform formatting or consistent markup, the task of creating a repeatable process of a migration script will be difficult and more time-consuming.

Does the content have references to media (images & files)? If your content contains references to media, this adds another step in the process. Your migration scripts will need to not only handle the migration of the assets but also alter the markup to replace the links/references to these assets.

What tools are available on the platform I am building the new website on? Most modern CMS platforms provide some level of migration support for getting content from point A to point B. A majority of the work that we do is in WordPress and Drupal, below is a quick list of migration options for each platform.

WordPress Migration Options

1. WordPress All Import Tool
2. WordPress Import Tool (Blogger, BlogRoll, LiveJournal, RSS, Tumblr, WordPress)
3. FG Drupal to WordPress
4. HTML Import 2

Drupal Migration Options

1. Drupal 8 Migrate
2. Drupal 7 Migrate
3. Feeds Module
4. Content Import

Other Useful (Platform Agnostic) Tools to help with content cleanup:

1. htmLawed
2. PHP DOM Manipulation
3. Site Sucker
4. Example Python Web Scraping

Determining the right solution

Now that you have all of the information you need, you can answer the two questions:

1. Does automating the process save me time?
2. Does automating the process save me money?

You are now equipped to make an informed decision on the approach you should be taking. You have a good grasp on what your source content looks like, how easy it is going to be to work with and what tools you have to give you a kickstart. Your next step is to crunch some numbers and get some high-level estimates on LoE for writing these migrations.

Trying to understand if website migration is the right approach for your organization? Bluetext can help.

About Drupal 8 Migrate

The migrate module has been moved into the core in Drupal 8, showing the community dedicated to making the process of upgrading between versions or migrating into Drupal easier. The migrate module takes advantage of the Drupal 8 Plugin system, offering developers with several plugin types that they can implement: MigrateProcessPlugin, MigrateSourcePlugin, and MigrateDestinationPlugin.

Quick Recap of our previous blog:

1. Complete rewrite & moved into Drupal 8 core
2. Out of the box support for D6 -> D8 and D7 -> D8
   1. Nodes, Users, Comments, Profiles, Taxonomies
   2. Content & Configuration
3. Support for custom sources and destinations
4. Processors for working with/manipulating data

Series Mapping:

Part 1: Migration Setup & Mappings

Part 2: Working with Processors

Part 3: Coming soon!

Drupal 8 Migrate Module Overview

The Drupal 8 migrate module that is shipped with core provides a set of API’s for setting up migrations. The module also provides extensible object-oriented base classes and interfaces for migration plugins including:

1. Source & Destination Plugins
2. Process Plugins
3. Config Migration Mappings

While the migrate module has been moved into core, the contributed space still provides significant value and I wouldn’t recommend trying to build a migration without it:

1. Migrate Plus: The Migrate Plus project provides extensions to core migration framework functionality as well as examples.
2. Migrate Tools: The Migrate Tools module provides tools for running and managing Drupal 8 migrations.

Creating Migration Mappings

In Drupal 8 all of your migration mappings are done through configuration files. In Drupal 7 these migration mappings would have been done in classes through the $this->addMapping() function.

Configuration files provide the blueprint for the migrations, and there are two main types of configuration files that we will need to define:

1. migrate_plus.migrate_group.<name>.yml
2. migrate_plus.migrate.<name>.yml

Migration Group

The migration group is a configuration file and is similar to the idea of hook_migrate_api in Drupal 7. This configuration file defines a group of migration classes and configures global configuration/settings to be shared across the classes.  

1. id – Unique identifier
2. shared_configuration – Defines shared configuration between all migration classes that are part of this group. **Example: setting the source database to use
3. dependencies – Sets the dependencies for this set of migration classes to function

Let’s see an example:

Migration Configuration File

The migration configuration file is similar to a migration class in Drupal 7. At a high level, the migration config file defines the metadata and field mappings for a particular migration in Drupal 8. There are 5 key concepts that you need to be aware of in the migration configuration file:

1. Definition – The definition of this migration class, its dependencies, and what migration_group it belongs to
2. Source – What migration source should be used for this migration when it is run (i.e. where am I migrating my content from?)
3. Destination – The destination for the migration (i.e. where am I migrating my content to?)
4. Field Mappings – The mappings from Source -> Destination
   1. Processors – The processing of the source data so that it can be consumed by the destination

Let’s see an example:

Stay tuned for our next blog post in our migration series on custom processors. In this post, we will dive into what it takes to create a custom processor for a WordPress to Drupal migration.

Would you like help to create a more detailed plan for migrating your website to Drupal 8?

Contact Us – We would be happy to help!

As one of the top Drupal firms in the market, we get a lot of questions around Drupal 8 and its broad range of functionality, including Drupal 8 Batch Processing. We thought to start out the new year, we would offer our primer on Drupal 8 Batch Processing.

What is a batch job?

A batch job or batch processing is the execution of a series of jobs in a program on a computer without manual intervention (non-interactive). Strictly speaking, it is a processing mode: the execution of a series of programs each on a set or “batch” of inputs, rather than a single input.

In English, this means that it allows a computer program to break up a series of tasks into smaller chunks or pieces that run without any manual intervention to trigger.

When would I want to use this?

Drupal 8 Batch Processing jobs are valuable to use when there could be large amounts of data or long processes running that utilize a significant amount of memory. An example would be regenerating all URL aliases on your website. The “pathauto” module sets up a batch process when doing this to regenerate 25 aliases at a time, instead of trying to regenerate an entire site (think 5,000 – 500,000 entities) at one time that might cripple the system.

Why would I want to use this?

Performance & Scalability are the biggest reason to utilize Drupal 8 Batch Processing in your development. Batch jobs allow the processing of large amounts of data without relying on a single process to complete the task from start to finish in a single execution. This allows your server resources to be utilized in smaller chunks and freed up after each batch execution finishes.

Here are some questions you can ask when determining if you might need to create a batch process:

1. Does the action I need to perform against these items have a per-item resource cost?
   • If the action your performing requires loading or processing of each item individually, you should be looking to use batch processing to handle it. If you are performing a simple task, such as a bulk DB query that impacts all nodes in your database, it may not be required.
2. Do I need to perform an action on a large number of entities?
   • If the answer is yes, than you will likely gain significant performance benefits by utilizing batch processing to work through your task.
3. Is there a finite set of data that I am performing actions on or can the dataset grow?
   • If you are unsure about how big your data set will get, you should strongly consider batch processing. Not planning for this upfront could cause site downtime and lots of headaches later down the road.
4. Even if your current data set is small, can it expand?
   • For example, maybe your site only has 30 nodes at the moment, but that number will increase in the future. If this is the case, or you are building a module that you may want to contribute back to the community, you will likely want to look at batch processing as an option for handling this action.

How do I do this?

Creating a batch process in Drupal 8 is relatively straightforward. Here is what you will need to get started:
Demo_batch

• src/Controller/DemoBatchController.php
• demo_batch.info.yml
• demo_batch.routing.yml
• demo_batch.mybatch.inc

Demo_batch.routing.yml

The routing file defines a route, the Controller to be used, and the requirements to use it.

DemoBatchController.php

The controller tells Drupal what to do when the route (defined above) is accessed. In this case, we are creating a Batch Controller which will handle the processing of the batch job.

demo_batch.mybatch.inc

This includes file provides the callback functions for the controller to handle execution of the job. In this example, we are running through a migration task.

Looking for help with your Drupal 8 development? Contact Us to find out how we can help.

 

When redesigning your website, an important decision is choosing between WordPress or Drupal platforms to host your new site.  Both platforms are open source software with a variety of plugins and modules available to increase functionality, but each platform has its own strengths better suited for different needs.  Here are five questions to ask when considering the right platform:

What are my website functionality needs?  Drupal hosts more advanced and in-depth features, such as user permissions, taxonomies, categories, blocks, views, etc.  These features are powerful and comprehensive if you know how to use them but useless and a hindrance if you aren’t familiar with the system.  The backend of Drupal is more complex whereas WordPress is more user-friendly and straight forward.  The platform best suited for your website depends on the required functionality and the user’s comfort level with the CMS.

How much content will my website have?  WordPress was originally built as a blogging platform and is not as suited to handle large volumes of content.  On the other hand, Drupal can handle thousands of content pages as well as thousands of users.  Drupal’s caching feature also increases the load speed of web pages.  For large complex websites, Drupal is the better platform by far.

What level of security will my website need?  Besides functionality and content volume, security is one of the largest differentiators between Drupal and WordPress.  Drupal provides enterprise level of security as well as in-depth security reports for its users.  The platform is secure enough that many government websites use the Drupal platform.  WordPress is prone to hackers, and it has been speculated the platform’s plugins open the system to possible security issues.

How technical is my team?  Many prefer WordPress with access to a variety of free themes and pre-built plugins that are easy to manage and available for use.  Drupal is more suited for custom development and the installation of its modules, the platform’s version of plugins, often require a developer to install and update.  WordPress features are more set and function out-of-the-box whereas Drupal allows for modules to be customized to your needs and requires more technical experience.

What are your cost constraints?  Drupal is a powerful, customizable, and secure platform but will require a Drupal developer to manage.  Premium themes and modules are more expensive on the Drupal platform while there are many free options on WordPress.  Due to content constraints on WordPress, as a company grows and expands its server costs to support the site on WordPress will increase significantly.

Drupal and WordPress are both powerful and useful platforms.  The decision of which to use rests largely on one’s needs, the functionality required, and how the website will develop and grow down the road.

Looking for best in class digital marketing?  Contact us.