I was doing some research the other day for a presentation based around the role of digital and particularly social media for a B2C brand and came across a post on Mashable about changing the world through social media.
The interesting part for me was point 7 - build it on Drupal. Why is that interesting? Well, mostly because all of our new website developments are based on Drupal and we love it at White Hat Media.
There is clearly a massive amount of buzz around social media, mainly around the popular social networking sites Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare etc. as well as the cool ideas and implementations of strategies around social media.
However, these dynamic and community driven sites that people are interacting with have to be built using something and it seems that Drupal is ahead of the game as the platform of choice.
For those of you who don’t know much about Drupal, it is an open source content management system written in PHP. The great thing about it being open source, like a lot of other popular platforms (think Firefox for browser, Thunderbird for email, Linux for OS), is the fact that there is an entire community behind it constantly developing modules that allow a multitude of additional functionality which you can simply plug in. That is powerful stuff when you think Drupal.org has more than 650,000 user accounts and more than 2000 developer accounts. That makes a lot of sense when you think about it; a community building a tool that builds communities online.
This is one of the reasons Drupal is ahead of the game when integrating social media into sites. There are a large number of modules out there that assist in creating an interactive experience. Check out the list of the community building and social networking modules here - Gigya was a key release last year.
So why do companies choose Drupal? The consensus seems to be that it is extremely easy to use and both efficient and completely scalable as a platform. This is echoed in the post I read stating that Drupal has now become the platform for Causecast, a site where “media, philanthropy, social networking, entertainment and education converge to serve a greater purpose.” They moved the site from Ruby on Rails because of all these reasons. Drupal also powers Recovery.gov which was a key part of President Obama’s commitment and accountability. If it’s good enough for the president it’s good enough for us.
There is also the minor point that Drupal keeps on winning a lot of accolades having won Packt Publishing Best Open Source CMS award in 2008 and the first ever Hall of Fame award last year.
Check our Flickr gallery showing some of our clients' work including Drupal based websites.
