Why Drupal

Drupal is trusted by global government agencies, major media companies, international charities and world-leading universities. It's our go-to platform for building ambitious, high-performing digital experiences.

Using Drupal, we create powerful, interactive applications and websites. It lets us do clever stuff for our clients that other CMSs can’t. It’s so flexible that everything we develop using Drupal is totally unique.

Drupal is backed by an active and passionate community of over 1 million people. They continuously create and improve numerous modules and add-ons that provide pretty much everything we need for any project. Our developers are firmly rooted in that community – some have been writing Drupal code for over 10 years.

And now, with the current version of Drupal, we can do even more. It’s no longer just about customer-facing websites. In addition, with Drupal as middleware, we can fully integrate your team's business processes into your web applications.

Drupal 9

Drupal 9 is the current version of Drupal. All of our new Drupal development work is in Drupal 9, and we recommend anyone migrating from older versions opts for this version.

During the development of Drupal 8, the Drupal project decided to embrace Symfony, which has been described as the standard library for PHP. In moving away from trying to do everything itself, this decision represented a major change for open source projects. The end result was that by adopting the extremely broad, security-minded feature set of Symfony, Drupal could instead focus on building features for CMS-driven applications.

Drupal 9 continues this innovative drive embracing other systems, almost borg like, and extending them to build best in class software.

Since then, the Drupal project has launched a number of CMS innovations. These include RESTful Web Services, which lets native mobile apps or web services consume or feed information from/to a Drupal site. There is also a browser-based layout builder that can be used to provide customer user interface experiences.

While Drupal 9 offers the same features as the final minor version of Drupal 8 (8.9), it runs on a newer version of Symfony. And crucially, upgrades of the future are set to be less onerous. That means lower total cost of ownership to your business, and more of your budget for user led features.

Even so, why use Drupal? On a practical level, what does it offer?

It’s a long list, so grab a coffee and we’ll explain….

Better performance and scalability

Drupal’s fabulous content delivery network (CDN) and caching integration enable us to make your personalised sites fast for all customers, no matter where they are.

Previously, any changes would require large sections of pages or websites to be republished. Now, however, by using innovative cache tags, Drupal can selectively republish much smaller sections of pages or websites when changes occur, speeding up content delivery.

Editor simplicity

Gone are the days when you have to edit in some antiquated desktop editing system. Instead, with Drupal 9 you can edit and preview your content in context.

It’s far more efficient to be able to edit text, and drag and drop images into place, while viewing it as end-users will see it. Your editing team can spot any design and usability issues and resolve them immediately, instead of second-guessing the end result.

Multilingual support

Drupal 9 has fantastic internationalisation features, including browser language detection. We can also add geolocation features, such as making content or navigation links available only in certain countries. For example we’ve published content for customers that appears differently in the USA and in Canada.

We’ve worked on a number of multilingual applications, such as the EMEA Cartoon Network sites owned by Turner Broadcasting, Cubiks’ globally-focussed website and FourFourTwo, to name but a few.

Accessibility

Drupal 9 ships with enhanced accessibility. Accessibility has always been important, but is becoming much more so with recent legislation covering public sector websites and mobile apps. New websites have to meet certain accessibility standards and have an accessibility statement, while any published before September 2018 have to be compliant by September 2020. Mobile applications have until June 2021.

This legislation only applies to public sector organisations, but being accessible is good practice generally. It allows more people to access your products and services, widening your potential customer base. And that has to be a good thing.

We’re always keen to ensure anything we develop is accessible by as broad an audience as possible. Improvements in the current version of Drupal now help us achieve this.

Headless publishing

Drupal 9 excels at providing techniques for API-first publishing, sometimes referred to as ‘headless publishing’. This allows web applications, syndication partners and iOS and Android apps to take your content seamlessly and manage it programmatically.

Drupal 9 enterprise web development

Much as we loved working with Drupal 6 and 7, it was harder to do unit testing and write correctly abstracted code before Drupal 8. Now, Drupal’s adoption of Symfony and the more professional approach Drupal has taken for exposing and accessing the development tool stack is ideal for enterprise projects. This, of course, continues with Drupal 9 and allows us to build a robust platform with built in testing that over time lowers the total cost of ownership.

We can now build and identify software issues more quickly by using methods such as automated tests and code quality tools found in libraries across the open source network. This is all thanks to Drupal embracing the shared PHP ecosystem, which many PHP projects rely on to maximise quality.

Drupal as middleware

The addition of Symfony has also unlocked many opportunities for enterprises. It offers a plethora of ways to make Drupal act as middleware between many business applications – from customer relationship management platforms (CRMs) to Salesforce systems, to finance and stock systems.

We have completed numerous projects integrating with internal business systems. Usually we can do this without having to go back to enterprise resource planning (ERP) providers, such as SAP or Salesforce, to seek long-term changes to business system flows.

Drupal – a Gartner contender

Although it didn’t seem like it when Drupal 8 launched, this release propelled Drupal forward to the point where it is competing with Sitecore, Adobe and Episerver in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

The difference with Drupal is that your team is fully in control of your organisation’s destiny. As an open source CMS, there are no hidden extra licencing fees and no potential pricing surprises. It also means your business isn’t reliant on the whims of another company in terms of which features remain supported and are enhanced in future.

Get ready for Drupal 9

Drupal 9 is the first major Drupal release that doesn’t require a rewrite of your applications. The big change is that deprecated parts of the CMS are simply being taken out. The Drupal ‘ecosystem’ has announced these deprecations in advance, which means almost all the code we write in Drupal 8 sites are also Drupal 9-ready.

What does this mean? When the Drupal project deprecates something in the Drupal core, it doesn’t always mean that piece of functionality is leaving Drupal. Instead, it often means there is a more modern way of accomplishing that outcome, so we choose to remove the old way to keep your Drupal project lean and clean.

Book a Drupal 9-ready site audit

Full Fat Things has been building projects in a Drupal 9-ready way for a long time, as well as being one of the top contributing companies to the Drupal project globally. We have tools in place to tell us where a current project is not Drupal 9-ready, so that we can remedy this and make your next major version upgrade simpler.

We can help you get ready for Drupal 9 by looking at both your core Drupal application and any extensions and modules you have plugged in. Contact us to book a Drupal 9 readiness audit and to find out how we could help transition your applications for the new opportunities that come with Drupal 9.