What Makes Drupal Development a Preferred Choice for Websites for Higher Education?

Managing the digital presence of your university or college is a humongous task, but with a fast growing organization, it is important to manage tons of pages, web content and large number of users efficiently. The ability to cope up with such challenges is the main reason why more and more higher education organizations are looking for feature rich CMS to build their website. Drupal CMS development has all the features to cope up with such challenges and that is the reason why more and more universities and organizations are choosing Drupal to create their websites.

Whether you are building a fairly medium sized school or college website or a huge portal for the university students and faculty, the first and the most important question is how rich your CMS is. Since education websites always look for great user experience, flexibility and security, Drupal CMSdevelopment can do all these and hence is the most preferred platform for them.

Affordable CMS with powerful features:

What makes Drupal CMS stand out is that it is a license free CMS and comes with no additional costs once you start to use it. Though it is an open source CMS, it comes with rich features that helps in quality development, and considers the factors like reliability and scalability. And due to its huge community, there are more than 43 thousand free modules that helps the Drupal developers to easily customize and extend the features.

Great Control on Content:

With great user access control over content, the site administrators can easily create and divide the roles and remove the extra burden from a single person. The domain access modules allow sharing of the content across multiple sites allowing the admins to share the configuration setting among many colleges and education portals.

High Performance:

By partnering with a Drupal development company, you can create a good site that can load within 3 seconds and without losing your visitors. This is of course a challenging task and it is here that Drupal shines. The combination of web optimization and caching modules make your site one of the best for the education sector.

Security: 

It is true that students share a lot of their personal information on educational sites and it is highly important to maintain the security of such sites. Drupal sites are safe as they monitor all the third party modules and constantly scan for bugs that might lead to any security breaches.

Also Read: Drupal 8.8: What The Latest Version Has to Offer the Users

Responsive and Multilingual

With the mobile era, most students and staffs prefer to use their cell phones and access the college information and Drupal 8 development comes with the mobile first approach and helps to create responsive sites that are great on any device. not only this, Drupal also allows institutions to use the multilingual feature to create websites in different languages that help to present the information to global users as well.

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What makes Drupal 8 development a preferred CMS for educational institutes

Drupal is considered to be the most widely used open source CMS that is designed to create enterprise websites. Based on the PHP language it has powered more than 5% of the websites using its different versions. But did you know that the most renowned universities and educational organizations are created using Drupal 8?   It is the most preferred CMS in higher education because it supports current and future needs of the students, alumni, faculty and also their communities.

Reasons Why Drupal CMS Development is Preferred in Building Educational Sites:

Multi-Site Functionality:

Drupal development comes with built-in multisite functionalities and most educational organizations have to maintain multi-faceted websites that serve a broad range of purposes. Drupal development companies can help organizations create independent websites and give the control and ownership to individual departments. This control structure helps to reduce the administrative overhead and allows to create intranets for any educational institute.

Multiple Languages:

With international students accessing the organization from different countries, the college or university should offer multiple language features so that they can easily understand the information that is shared on the site. Such multilingual features are impressive in Drupal 8 as it comes with 4 multilingual modules that help to translate everything from interface to content. With a great choice of over a hundred languages, Drupal developers can now create sites in different languages.

Easy Responsive Designs:

It is estimated that more than 80% students try to access their institute using their smartphone and with Drupal 8 development you can easily browse your site and stay updated as Drupal offers great features to the users by delivering a smoother, responsive website experiences out of the box. Drupal sites adapt to the changing needs of the users and based on the specific needs, it allows the admins to manage the content with a dashboard that is responsive and mobile ready. You can easily use Drupal themes customization features to make the themes perfectly responsive.

Also Read: Drupal 8.8: What The Latest Version Has to Offer the Users

Collaboration Modules:

Beside creating static pages, course schedules, blogs, forums and articles, Drupal also offers powerful collaboration features and document management features that help the back end users. Though the systems are not typically part of the public front end, but they are crucial for both the faculty and the students who require access to handbooks, manuals, procedural guides and other research documents. Drupal supports the internal teams and educational institutes with collaborative tools for better communication.

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Getting to Know About the Features of Drupal 8 CMS

Drupal 8 has been launched with some power packed features that include scalability, flexibility and increased page load speed.  Drupal is a remarkable CMS that is preferred by both the developers and website owners. Though migration may not be an easy task, especially when you have to consider data migration and module shifts, but a great way to reduce the hiccups is to remain prepared well beforehand.

Drupal migration needs efficiency and should be done by the right Drupal development partner and hiring them will ease the purpose. Let me familiarize you with the most important facts that you should keep in mind while migrating to Drupal 8.

Complete Theme Overhaul:

Once you have completed the migration process, be prepared to find your website in a complete different look than it originally looked in either Drupal 6 or 7. This is simply because of the change in the themes or templates that are used in the previous version. But this theme overhaul needs a lot of preparation work and detailed planning is needed. In the earlier versions the concept of responsive design did not exist, but Drupal 8 offers responsive designs for a better user experience and to meet the mobile user’s needs.

Move to Advanced Architecture:

Migrating to Drupal 8 offers the perfect opportunity to update your old architecture. Though it may appear to be a difficult task, yet it is the best opportunity for you to consider the information regarding the architecture that you may need because of the migration process. It implies that you need to analyze the fields and modules carefully before switching to Drupal 8.

Well Defined Configuration Management:

Drupal 8 development companies can now help you to easily develop a website as it has a new feature called the “Export Configuration” that helps you to export the full site configuration or even a single configuration file. The entire configuration is presented in text files in the YAML format. There is no need to use additional modules to deploy a configuration when changing from one environment to another.

Also Read: Common Mistakes Made by Drupal Beginners that Needs to be Avoided

Performance Improvement:

With Drupal 8, you can now optimize your website speed by reducing the HTTP requests, minimizing the HTML, JavaScript, CSS and etc. Drupal 8 now has effective page caching with a new system, which is called the cache tags and that is enabled by default. Instead of loading the content over and over again, it can easily be loaded from the cache.  This of course helps to significantly improve the efficiency in attaining your business goals.

Brand New Theme Engine:

Drupal has also come up with a brand new theme engine which is called TWIG.  This is a PHP based theme engine which is flexible enough, quicker and faster and at the same time fully secure. This is of course a great news for the developers as they can now develop more functional Drupal websites because of Twig. The templates involve less complex syntax compared to the PHP template while they are more secure than others.

Multilingual Features:

Translation is very easy with Drupal 8 development. Website owners can now target their global audience as Drupal now has multilingual capabilities. The translation systems of Drupal 8 are now fully integrated, making it possible to install 100 languages out of the box. Drupal 8 now comes with a powerful translation module, interface translation, configuration translation and content translation to offer excellent experience via multiple devices.

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