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Drupal CMS Development: Reinventing Digital Experiences

Written by Kanika Gupta | Sep 7, 2022 3:43:00 AM

Customer experience is all about understanding and responding to your customer's expectations as early as possible. Improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy should be your primary concern when it comes to delivering an inevitable customer experience.

Today, Global Tech Giants are experiencing the power of Drupal and delivering an inevitable user experience to its customers. With the ever-evolving technological innovations, Drupal easily manages and delivers personalized content across different channels and devices.

In this article, we’ll go all over Drupal, its benefits, the latest version of Drupal 10, features, and so on.

Let’s get started.

Drupal is considered pivotal for companies to embrace the web content management system to meet the ubiquitous demand for personalized content. And it all starts with engaging customers, lead generation, and measuring revenues from various platforms.

 
 
Drupal core 10.0.0-beta-1 is expected to be released in September 2022. 

 

Let's first discuss a brief about what Drupal is all about.

What Is Drupal?

Drupal is a powerful content management system (CMS) that is powering a plethora of websites today. It provides businesses and marketers the right platform to develop and manage sites, multi-channel digital experiences, and shopping experiences. It facilitates marketers with a complete digital ecosystem integrated with digital marketing-related tools and technology.

The Drupal CMS is known to offer a seamless content authoring experience with excellent security of data from cyber threats.  But above all, it is the flexibility that Drupal offers to its users to deliver dynamic digital experiences.  

Also Read: Everything Enterprises Need To Know About Drupal Multi-site Management

 

The content management system is flexible, open, easy to integrate with, and easy to deploy for digital marketers and entrepreneurs. And when connected with the thousands of modules in the market, the functionality of Drupal simply expands to the zenith. It easily connects to marketing automation, CRM, email marketing, analytics, optimization, and other digital solutions.

Benefits Of Integrating Drupal CMS

It is easy to say that the flexibility, modularity, and authoring experience delivered by Drupal make it one of the best CMS out there. However, there are various other benefits and advantages offered by Drupal that make it one of the best for CMS development

Here are some benefits business enterprises can get while building a website on a Drupal-based platform.

  • Being an open-source platform, Drupal has huge community support that allows easy modifications to the website for seamless branding.

  • Drupal is an enterprise CMS. So, it offers a complete set of features like themes, SEO, content moderation, integrations, Drupal multisite management, and more.

  • It enables businesses to maintain uniformity and consistency in delivering digital experiences across different channels in their journey. 

  • Drupal 9 CMS is known for enhancing website performance through image optimization, code enforcing, caching, JS minimization, and more.

  • You can improve operational efficiency by getting offshore Drupal development. It facilitates content publishing with less or zero support from the technical team.

  • Creating and editing content can be done by the entire team. You have complete access to content architecture and moderation using the Drupal CMS.  

  • You can hire drupal developers who can use a single code base to easily manage multiple platforms and simplify the management of the code base.

These were some of the core benefits that are continuously pulling businesses towards the Drupal CMS.

However, while businesses and marketers are moving towards Drupal as their next CMS to deliver a seamless digital experience, there is a tough race to ace at it.

Why Drupal Development Is Worth Your Attention?

With over 1.5 million live sites & domain redirects, Drupal certainly has huge traffic. It goes without saying that there is fierce competition for businesses to stay up-to-date and deliver an unmatched experience. And why shouldn't there be?

Drupal is offering everything and more to businesses in terms of content management and delivery.

Here are some of the core things that are drawing businesses towards Drupal and why you should make the switch too.  

Drupal Serving Unconventional Market Demands

Using a Drupal-based platform, enterprise owners can build a fully optimized and powerful website for every device that integrates easily with all your marketing tools.

Drupal is all set to meet these unconventional market demands right away.

Content Presentation With A Headless Architecture

Today, customer experience is considered the new standard to measure digital business success. Drupal facilitates the content presentation and too with a headless architecture.

Headless architecture is an architecture that is without the front-end components that is front-end framework and templates. Drupal helps to integrate front-end technologies like React and Angular. It will add a new dimension to the digital experience.

Balancing The Hardware-Software Relationship

Frequently changing consumer demands make enterprises find new ways to distribute content across different channels. The sudden increase in Smartphones and portable devices usage has triggered the origin of stand-alone software apps.

It requires an easy integration between hardware devices (like an apple watch) and software to showcase the content in the desired format.

Digital Experience+ Digital Innovation= Drupal CMS

 

Personalization With Machine Learning And Predictive UX

By launching advanced analytic capabilities, data mining, real-time insights, and machine learning, business enterprises are trying to discover patterns in data and forecasting to deliver the best digital user experience.

A recent study by Elastic revealed that 88% of online shoppers would continue shopping from a particular site if it is offering a personalized experienced. And out of these 96% are GenZ and 97% Millenials, the future of shoppers. 

For business enterprises, machine learning has the power to scale across a wider range of businesses.

Acquia Lift Connector, a Drupal module, supports integration with the Acquia Lift service. It provides an enhanced user experience for web personalization, testing, and front-end components.

Chatbots To Drive The Business Value

Drupal's project SupportChat is a Drupal 8 module that allows easy and seamless chatting. However, Drupal Chat Bot or Chatbot API is offering complete support for building chatbots using this CMS. By providing a conversational UI that interacts with users is vital for any organization. Chatbots is all about understanding what user want to know, then passing information to the backend, and at the end delivering them with faster and better responses. In Drupal, Chatbot API helps integrate Chatbots with your website.

Exploring Markets With Augmented Reality (AR) And Virtual Reality (VR)

Drupal leads when it comes to digital innovation with cutting–edge technologies.  By the year 2022, there is a predicted increase in the market size of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.

Why Say Yes To Drupal?

While we know the various benefits that are offered by Drupal or the features that are attracting more businesses, marketers, and even digital agencies to this CMS, there are various things that make Drupal CMS stand out. 

Digital Innovation- A Platform For Digital Innovation And Ideas

The latest Drupal CMS facilitates continuous digital innovation at leading brands like Tesla motors and Grammy. Using Drupal CMS, digital marketers and web developers can develop and easily manage incredible web, mobile and social experiences. With Drupal, they can improve and adapt to changes instantly just with the help of digital innovation and ideas derived from the Drupal community.

Rocket Speed-Build New Sites And Enhance User Experiences

In Digital marketing, speed matters the most. The organization needs a platform that supports them to upgrade speedily when it comes to digital innovation. By using Drupal’s flexible platform, marketers and developers overcome bugs as they can run a fast and agile team and create an inevitable and seamless user experience.

Highly Scalable- World’s Busiest Sites Run On Drupal

Drupal works best for the entire world’s high-traffic websites like Grammy.com and The Olympics where there is no chance of any kind of failure. Apart from delivering support to the busiest websites worldwide, Drupal will scale your business and your brands for the next-generation digital transformation. It helps you providing immense power so that you can become a next-generation brand.

Also Read: 6 Reasons Why You Should Explore Drupal 8
 

Brands Using Drupal

To give you some real-life examples, we are going to show you a glimpse of some classic and prestigious websites made at Drupal-based platform.

  • Tesla Motors

    Tesla, the world’s biggest electric car manufacturer whose electric cars and direct sales model revolutionizing the auto industry build their multi-language website on Drupal.

  • The Grammy

    The Grammy Awards is the world’s most prestigious awards event and its runs grammy.com on Drupal. It showcases videos, shares interviews of celebrities, and covers other event news.

  • Pfizer

    Pfizer is one of the world’s best bio pharmaceutical companies that run multi-lingual websites on the Drupal-based platform. It can serve its client with the detailed information of the products and the health-related advisory.

  • NBC

    Drupal powers NBC to showcase TV episodes, sports, and entertainment news to all the viewers worldwide.

  • McDonald Australia

    MacDonald’s Australia branch also decided to create a website that is highly scalable and fast to build, so they decided to dive into the Drupal content management system. The website provides offers, menus, job opportunities, and so on.

 

Let's have a look at the upcoming version of Drupal- Drupal 10. 

Drupal 10 is all set to be released by December 2022. The beta version is out in September and the next version is set to release in December. They will release with stabilized CKEditor and complete strategic requirements for Drupal's front end. Releasing Drupal 10.0.0 in December would also allow it to be released with Symfony 6.2. It will also include forward compatibility with PHP 8.2. 

Source: Drupal

Migrating From Drupal 9 To Drupal 10 

Drupal 8 reached its end life in November 2021 after the release of Drupal 9. Similar fate would be expected for Drupal 9 once the newest version is released. Businesses would be required to migrate from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 in order to get their CMS updated to drupal version 10. 

Businesses would need to get an estimate of the work required using Drupal Status. Once the Drupal Upgrade Status is live, you can get updates on the areas where you would need to use the drupal-rector. This would also give you a clear insight on areas where your custom codes would need updates from your development team and other areas where contributed projects code would need updates. 

Drupal has even mentioned that majority of the code update that you need while migrating to Drupal 10 can be easily done using drupal-rector. You can even use this same feature for the custom coding that you need.  

Those using earlier versions of Drupal would also need to migrate to the later versions of Drupal. Drupal 7 will reach its end of life in November 2023 and Drupal 8 will come with all the tools required for migrating the platforms. The contributed projects would also be available for Drupal 9 but will take some time to be ready for Drupal 10. Hence, you should always take the approach of migrating steading through each version and not wait to jump the guns to the latest version of drupal 10 from Drupal 7. 


The Final Word

Drupal’s modular approach and ready-to-go configurations provide fast access to the market and the ability to keep pace with digital evolution. Drupal is among the leading technologies dominating the IT industry and providing businesses the flexibility and scalability to innovate by keeping your user’s behavior and preferences in mind.

At Classic Informatics, we help you build a seamless online presence for consistent branding across all channels or touchpoints. As your offshore Drupal development company, we build CMS that can deliver your clients an inevitable user experience and also improve your ROI.