Why Your Business Should Choose Drupal

It's a debate that seems to never end. Drupal or WordPress? WordPress or Drupal? To me, the answer is simple: Drupal.

Don't get me wrong, WordPress works great out of the box for blogs and static websites. It has a very well refined user interface and comes complete with a WYSIWYG editor out of the box. What turns most people off from Drupal is the rather clunky interface and lack of WYSIWYG editor out of the box.

Drupal's modularity is part of what makes it such an excellent solution for a business website. If you decide to add a blog to your website, just enable the module. If you want a forum, enable the module. If you want to add e-commerce capabilities, enable the module. There is no need to redevelop your website.

Drupal offers extensive theming capability. You can theme your website as a whole or by content types, regions, blocks, or even fields. This means you can layout and style any part of your website exactly as you wish without using hacks.

With Content Construction Kit (moved to Core in Drupal 7), Drupal offers the ability to easy create content types that do exactly what you need them to do. When coupled with Views, your possibilities for creating and displaying content are endless. (By the way, Views allows you to easily manipulate what content is displayed from each content type, even based on relationships to other content types.)

Do you have multiple places on your website that you might want to display a single image? Do you want that image cropped and/or scaled depending on that location? As far as I am aware, WordPress does have a plugin that allows you to do this within posts, but Drupal does it as a completely automated process. For example, when I upload a screenshot for my portfolio, Drupal creates the images to display on that post, on the portfolio listing, and on the home page for me. While this is via the ImageCache module in Drupal 6, it has been added to Core in Drupal 7.

Do you want to be able to easily manipulate any and all menus on your website? While WordPress does offer the ability to manage your menus, many developers choose to code them directly. Drupal takes menu building completely out of the hands of the developer and only allows you to manipulate the menus through the administration interface. You can easily change what appears in each menu and where those menus appear without worrying about being at the mercy of a developer with poor habits.

Drupal is hands down the best CMS choice for small businesses, especially if they are anticipating adding additional features later to their website. If you want a starting point for a fresh Drupal installation, check out these must-have modules.