Drupal, the platform for rapid web development

We have been using Drupal for building websites because it is one of the best open source development platforms out there. Sometimes, being so close to something makes us forget why we got excited about it in the first place, so it's nice to see something like Kurt Cagle's post on Drupal as Open Architecture to remind us.

Although traditionally Drupal has been grouped together with other 'Content Management Systems' (that terminology means almost nothing in this day and age... we should really stop using it), we see it more as a flexible platform for building web applications rapidly and effectively. Here's a quick breakdown of where we see Drupal's strengths are:

• Ability to get up and running with a basic site in a matter of minutes
• Its large and growing library of open source modules: 4000 and counting... you'd be hard pressed to find something that doesn't fit your need
• Extremely customisable using bespoke code
• Multi-language support out of the box
• Large community of developers: "There's almost as many people developing the Drupal core as there are developing the Linux kernel" (Jeff Whatcott from Acquia, first dedicated commercial Drupal company, at Launch Pad 2008)
• Over half a million websites run on it, by small shops and large multi-national companies

Drupal allows us to design, build, customise, deploy and improve client websites at speeds never before attainable, certainly not with write-from-scratch projects using CakePHP or Ruby on Rails, although we still do use these powerful frameworks for projects with specific needs.

Cagle puts it well:

What makes all this effort so worthwhile is that Drupal has now reached a point where you can create a sophisticated web portal without having to know how to program precisely because of this modularity. With Drupal, I can use the Content Construction Kit (CCK) in order to build new content types, can create forums and community blogs, can use blocks and panels in order to position content in specific areas on the page (and establish parameters on those pages), can work with views to create the relevant database queries that let me create a page of gallery images or videos with specific keywords or RSS and Atom feeds, can work with taxonomies that let me build tag clouds and dynamic navigation, and so on ... and I don't need to write a single line of PHP or SQL code to make any of it happen.

I can write such code if I want to - the extensibility mechanisms for Drupal are well documented and are generally not that hard to work with - but the importance here is that I don't have to write that code. Indeed, for all that I thoroughly enjoy working with Ruby, one thing that's rubbed at me for a while is that Ruby on Rails is still based upon this paradigm that you have to write code in order to build a site, which means that Ruby will always be of use only to those people who can write Ruby code in the first place.