What is Drupal? the short answer.

Drupal is a content management system (CMS). The basic idea behind any content management system is to allow nontechnical users to manage the content on your website.

The long answer of 'What is Drupal?'

Drupal is an open source content management framework. Its framework allows developer to build scalable websites quickly.

When developers extend the core functionality of Drupal's core framework, they create modules. Modules are designed to hook into the core system and extend Drupal's Core functionality.

In August of 2013, Drupal had more than 22,900 contributed modules. With active Drupal communities, you are able to build custom website functionality with a relatively short turn around. Our normal project is roughly 3 months from start to finish.

When is Drupal Right for you?

Truth be told, there are a lot of good content management systems avaible on the market. Here are some areas that Drupal really excels in: 

Subscription and/or Forum Websites

The core behind most subscription and forum websites is managing content on a per role basis for your admins, contibutors, editors, and maybe even paid memeberships. Drupal core can grant different types of permissions using the stock configuration tools and it's also relatively easy to extend Drupal functionality to support a paid memebership. Recurly is a favorite tool for that.

For a good example you can check out Demand Metric. They started out as a paid memebership website for marketing profesional and with their redesign, they are quickly morphing into a vibrant community of marketers.

Ecommerce Website

In combination with Drupal 7 & the commerce module, Drupal has become a very flexible ecommerce solution. 

Awhile back we launched Arrojonyc.com. They needed a two fold system.  One system was the e-commerce website to allow their wholesale network to purchase products at a discount and acrew rewards basis on the volume of products they bought.

The second aspect of the system was to build a video subscription site. We were able to leverage Drupal's flexible framework to grant users a role that would allow them to view education videos when they bought a subscprition. 

Multilingual Websites

Drupal has always been friendly to multilingual websites, especially in Drupal 7 and will be even more multilingual friendly when they release Drupal 8.  What makes Drupal's content management system so successful is its ability to build easy to use admin interfaces that allow a translator to edit and format the content for each language.  

One real work example is a system we built for the Emergogroup. They are a multinational company that operates with 8 different languages and will be expanding as they open up new markets. What we built for them was a pretty innovative system at the time. The website served different content based on the user's IP address. So if an end user was viewing the website from Germany, it would give the phone number to their local office in Germany.  

Web Applications

Since Drupal is a database and API driven framework, it provides the tools for developers to input, store, and pull out data. Which means you are able to be very innovative in displaying data. 

For Weddle Industry we built them a Gear Ratio Calculator. This allows their customers to figure out the best gear and pino ratio for the max speed of their vehicle.  

Advanced Searching

Drupal's native search is pretty good by most standards, but it doesn't give the same experience that Google does. That's why for most clients we recommend integrating Drupal with Apache Solar. It's faceted search allows the user to quickly drill down to the content the end user is looking for. You can read my blog Choosing the right search for Drupal for more information. 

One good example was when we built the searching system for Tippybob.com. They needed to quickly search a huge database of financial advisors and return results based on name, city/state, or zip. 

Wrapping it up

To sum up Drupal and its use case: "If you are looking for anything more than an informational website Drupal is the right choice."