Drupal Content Management System (CMS)
Heim + Associates uses the Drupal content management system (CMS) for all of it website design and website development projects. We selected the Drupal platform mostly for its strength in social publishing and its flexibility to meet the needs of diverse organizations. Though there are many CMS options in the market today, for our clients, we believe Drupal is the best choice.
So, What is Drupal?
Drupal is an award-winning open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It's distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or "GPL"), which means anyone is free to download it, share it with others, and contribute back to the project. In its most basic installation, Drupal provides non-technical users with the ability to manage website users, content, and presentation. It provides for fine-grain control over user access to content and functionality with administrator defined user roles and permissions. Drupal facilitates the creation, editing, and managing of content with intuitively user-friendly forms and interfaces. It is flexible enough to handle any kind of web content, including video, text, blog, podcasts, polls and more. Drupal's 9000+ secure and stable add-on modules provide a wide array of cutting-edge functionality that needs only to be turned on and configured to your needs. It's extremely flexible theme layer can handle virtually limitless possibilities for creating highly usable, interactive experiences that engage users and increase traffic. And, with a long-standing development focus on social publishing, Drupal is ideally suited to connecting and sharing with other websites, web services, and social media across the web. Drupal powers 2% of the 300 million + websites in existence today, including sites like The White House, FedEx, The Economist, Harvard, the American Red Cross, the NCAA, the Miami Dolphins, and more. So, what is Drupal? Drupal is the website or application you need it to be.
Manage Website Users
Drupal comes with three predefined user roles - site administrator, anonymous users, and authenticated users (any logged in user). Beyond those, you are free to create as many unique user roles as you feel you may need. For example, you may want to have a role for writers who contribute blog posts or articles to the website, or perhaps a role for photo contributors who upload photo images and create photo galleries on the website. For each role you can assign specific content and system access permissions to enable each role user to accomplish his or her required tasks, without providing unnecessary access. This gives you firm control over access privileges for all website users, which helps keep your site secure.
Manage Website Content
Drupal's flexible core handles countless content types, including pages, blog posts, images, video, podcasts, polls, files, and much more, since Drupal gives you the ability to create your own distinct content types to serve your needs. Additionally, any content type can be extended beyond the basic title and body fields to contain numerous and varied addition fields, such as 3rd party videos or event times and dates. Drupal also makes it easy to plug-in any of a number of popular wysiwyg editors, so that writing and editing website content is as intuitive as using your word processor.
Manage Website Presentation
Drupal's presentation (theme) layer allows experienced web designers to create virtually any design imaginable. With highly customizable template files, JavaScript files and CSS files the designer has complete control over every element, great and small, of the website design. But you don't have to be a professional web designer to get the look and feel you want for your Drupal website. Drupal has a sizable inventory of contributed themes, which anyone can download and use. In addition, there are a number of powerful theme enhancement modules that provide a normal web interface for managing a variety of aspect of your theme.