Drupal is an open source framework (or platform) for building highly functional web sites. The underlying technology is called LAMP which refers to the 4 also open source building blocks it sits on (Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database and the PHP programming language.)
Drupal is extended by the wider community of Drupal developers writing plug-in modules that extend it's core functionality.
As such, Drupal is a very interesting platform when the objectives are large but the money is not! It must be said, however, that it is also fairly complicated and hard to master.
Chilli Digital have built around a dozen web sites based on the Drupal platform- so we are beginning to understand it's strengths and weaknesses - and those of some of the hundreds of modules written for it by the Drupal community!
To give you some idea about what is possible in Drupal by an experienced developer - the Chilli Digital site is written in Drupal and the programming and 'theming' probably took only 2 days in total. Several of our customers sites are also built in Drupal including this real estate site, this Italian travel site and this earned value and project management consulting site.
We have also integrated Drupal with Oracle for a business electricity company - making it work with several back-office systems.
Many of our Drupal implementations are designed around SEO (as all sites should be) and we have developed our own Drupal modules and techniques in the area of clean or human-readable URLs.
If you are using or considering Drupal, contact us for a no-obligation conversation about this incredibly powerful web development platform. Or if you are using Drupal in-house and want an external perspective, maybe we can just carry out a small project audit and help you through the Drupal maze!
