Why Content Management System (CMS)? - Why Drupal? For one thing, even folks with simple websites want the ability to modify, add, change web site content without paying through the nose for it, or learning a programming language.
Homeowner Associations - non-profits want all the bells and whistles that the big boys have with little or no budget to pay for it. In addition, they may want several people to be able to modify, add, change content such as newsletters, budgets, minutes, with no programming experience. In addition, they may desire protected areas for homeowners and other areas for board members.
Large Companies may want to bypass their IT department to get something done fast with little or no budget. Content modify, add, change may come from a world-wide network of folks and in different languages. The site may include areas for the general public, secure areas for customers, distributors. The site may include moderated forums, knowledgebase, technical support, rss news feeds, and sales articles, troubleshooting routines, and a repository of secure documents, catalogs, shopping carts, data acquisition, and program distribution.
Fact is, anyone from any category may want their website to do just about anything. And as needs change, why be strapped down to an obsolete system?
Why Not A Proprietary Solution? Why shouldn't you use “Amazing Web Company's proprietary CMS?” Look at how shiny it is! They talk coding geek! They must know what they're doing, right? Good programmers don’t necessarily make good businessman as Proprietary CMS vendors life expectancy is only about two to three years.
There are literally thousands of content management systems out there. It seems like every web development firm has their own beautifully branded version. Each blatantly promises to make it easy for you, the client, to update your own web site, even if you are as hopeless as my Chihuahua on a computer. As you know, the devil is in the details. Problem is, most CMS companies never last long enough to deliver on their promise.
Our Criteria - We knew we wanted an open source CMS that would be actively supported, flexible, and robust. It needed to be able to support our SEO (Search Engine Optimization (Google ranking) work, and also there had to be enough people working on it so that we knew it wouldn't be obsolete next year.
There are plenty of articles comparing CMS's, so I'm not going to go here. Suffice to say that after carefully reviewing the top systems, we chose Drupal for its combination of flexibility, scalability, world-wide support community, speed and maturity. Most importantly, though, we wanted something that would satisfy our customers.
Why Drupal? - But don't take our word for it. Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems on the Internet and is much more robust than it's competitors. According to estimates, there are an excess of 50,000 sites using Drupal. These include Amnesty International, MTV UK, Sony MusicBox, The Onion, Spread Firefox, and several political sites such as Vote Hillary and Draft Obama (you may or may not like their politics, but their websites are “state of the art”) IBM, NASA and Yahoo all use Drupal for their intranets (see "Why Yahoo! chose Drupal for an internal site"). NATO and the World Bank also use Drupal.
Drupal is a completely open source platform built on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (the engine that powers the internet and Android SpartPhones) and has a clean, focused core code base. It's really an application framework, which makes it easy to add modules for features without touching the core programming code, leaving the site safe for quick updates when needed.
Unlike many other CMS programs, Drupal code is compliant with XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) instead of using HTML tables to theme pages. It also supports a broad range of SEO techniques, making it easy for us to optimize sites for search engines. In addition, it works well in a shared hosting environment (the least expensive, most common web hosting packages).
Most importantly, Drupal has a large, friendly, worldwide community of developers who work on it, write modules to make it able to do more, and are there for support. The community is robust, VERY active and lead by some really smart people, which means that there are many sources for Drupal-related services if the need arises in the future.
We Choose Drupal! - So there, I've said it: we love Drupal. We've been working with it for a couple of years, and it's been a dream.