Drupal is an open source content management system and framework, a powerful and yet free website builder, with which one can easily publish, manage and organize a wide assortment of content on a website. There has been a rapid increase in Drupal adoption and it has become quite a rage with webmasters/developers, bloggers and organizations. Various companies including high profile large enterprises as well as medium and small businesses run their websites on Drupal. With Drupal these site-owners can effortlessly enhance the look of their websites with immeasurably attractive features that Drupal offers. Drupal can be used to tailor-make almost any visual layout.

Websites that use Drupal
Based on PHP which is highly compatible with different operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and others, Drupal is used by some of the busiest and popular websites such as WhiteHouse.gov. In addition, the world’s most visited art museum, Louvre’s website also uses Drupal. Moreover, Zynga, the brainchild behind creating ‘Farmville’ has its core website on Drupal. What’s more is that Twitter’s developer community is also using Drupal. Other bigwigs using Drupal include Yahoo Research, NASA, Amnesty International, United Nations’ End Poverty and Fight Hunger programs and the list goes on.

Drupal is basking in its glory in the world of content management system. Among numerous aspects that set it apart are its incomparable social multimedia publishing features that are being supported by the Drupal community.

Drupal Modules
One of the mind blowing features of Drupal is its ‘Modules’. Available aplenty the Drupal modules are free add-ons which have been contributed by the over 10,000 developers of the Drupal community to enhance the assortment of Drupal functionality for free. Designed to assist websites for their successful functioning in the form of blogs, communities, forums, image galleries, Ecommerce sites, event calendars, etc. the modules can be installed and configured by following the step by step tutorials or in some cases, just by installing and enabling them. These Drupal modules help in creating unique and attractive use cases for websites. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the rapid increase in Drupal adoption.

Drupal themes
‘Drupal themes’ are additional features that draw various organizations to switch to Drupal. Drupal themes provide an artistic and creative look to the site. A collection of styles, graphics, and templates, the themes use XHTML, CSS, and PHP to decorate a webpage by providing a wide range of color schemes. You can choose from a default set of themes for your webpage via a special menu or download from the hundreds in the free community base. Most of the popular Drupal themes also allow you to change the color schemes of your website through a web browser interface.

Documentation
Another raison d'être for rapid increase in the adoption of Drupal is the presence of ‘Documentation Pages’. Written by the Drupalists aka active Drupal community members in collaboration with the Documentation Team, it is a place where one writes and reviews documentations to gain and share knowledge about Drupal with other Drupalists. However the most important issue that is found, written and shared in the Documentation Pages is the step by step instructions on the guidelines, style, syntax and structure to be followed, to develop webpages which also includes Modules and Themes.

To conclude, the reason why there has been a rapid increase in Drupal adoption is that, Drupal is considered a Messiah in the Web World as it is the panacea for all the possible aspects required to build a website.

What were the key ingredients to this?

Design-wise:

• Lively
• Passionate
• Action-Encouraging

Development-wise:

• Drupal setup and back-end dev with customized modules
• Rich front-end development on the theme level
• Extensive and dynamic Flash integration

What did the company get out of this beautiful, engaging, brand spankin' new website?

• Thousands of views in the first few days following launch
• 40% of traffic coming from organic Search Engine Optimization techniques and Drupal modules
• Drupal's Ubercart (eCommerce module) connected to PayPal
• Increased content update productivity via Drupal's out of box Content Manager for blog/page/product updates and community contributed module Content Construction Kit for parent category organization
• Full fledged user management system with custom user roles access
  • Flexibility for Online Class user access (user role upgrade via Ubercart payment then video presentation via Embedded Media field module)
• Email management via Simplenews Drupal module
• Increased image features and decreased server load with ImageCache module
• WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) content updating with CKeditor (as easy as using Microsoft Word)
• Innovative dance community interaction, leading to increased loyalty

That finalizes the list of key features. Some of the unmentioned modules/module groups still holding hand in the site includes Tables API, Mail, Token, uBrowser, Workflow-ng and Drupal core modules.

Now the important part-what do you think about the website? do you need a equally magnificent site? Hit us up by click here.

Thank you,
Ivan Alfaro

Today we would like to share an insightful testimonial with you:

Kim Badenhop
SpiritedWhimsy.com Owner

Variations of this is something we hear or read everyday. The success of our company within the eCommerce design & development industry is completely dependent on the proven track records and knowledge of what is feasible, what is going to damage your conversion rates or general hosting performance. We also have extensive experience in customization and rapid response with 24/7 support.

To read more about our out-of-the-box solution in this area-click here

"...in this post are the biggest bottomless pits for website development and occasionally - design for business owners; along with what you can do to thwart it. As business owners, there are constant needs for keeping an eye on the future and working which can often push website needs aside, especially in a small business..."

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During the Rayvan re-branding to RayvanBros at the beginning of the year - we decided to leave our heavily seo-friendly website rayvan.net to become secondary - in order to migrate the individual page strength, we redirected relevant content to their newly due places. Leaving every other page to become a custom Page Not Found web page (404 error code) that leads back to the new website.

On the same topic - We were recently consulted for a private government contract to advise a realistic recommendation for migrating a 15,000+ page website into Drupal. But please do understand this is a totally different animal - although we are not talking about animals. Pages with 500+ pages should be systematically migrated.

So how do you assess if your website require systematic redirect or migration? does your website have a consistent URL file structure patterns? If so, they can redirected appropriately without the need for a 404. Here are 3 steps to make it happen (assuming your new web server is on an Apache-based server):

1. Setup the new website on a separate domain or private subfolder, if applicable. Generate a robots.txt file to block search engine crawls.
2. Use Apache's HTACCESS to setup a global redirect to identical file names to their respective directories or new domain name and/or directories.
3. All content that does not exist on the new domain should be connected to the new website's internal search engine that will use the previous file name's keywords to query all of the new web pages for relevance. If you do not have the time or budget to setup an internal search engine - contact us or use Google's Custom Search Engine - it is very easy to plug-in to your template and you can just pay the yearly commercial license fee if you need to remove advertisements

That's the gist. If you are an or hire an experienced web team performing this duty, it should take approximately 30 minutes for a small to medium scale website. Did anything confuse you, do need help with all or some of these steps? Drop us a line and don't be afraid to leave us feedback.

Thank you for your valuable time.