Website scalability is such a crucial aspect which has a huge say in the performance of digital firms.

Drupal is a highly scalable CMS. If you want your site to grow and be amongst the busiest of online spaces, then Drupal can scale with your needs. Even if you are already popular and offer stupendous digital experience to the customers, Drupal is scalable to cope with the gargantuan amount of traffic to your site content.

Large enterprises love Drupal with the digital presence of big names like Grammy, Weather.com, Pfizer, Time Inc., Tesla, Puma, Princess Cruises, and many more powered by Drupal. Whether it is the extreme traffic spikes on certain occasions or the constant web traffic, Drupal handles all of that with utmost ease.

Drupal accommodates content growth and supports the most content-rich sites and experiences. It scales to govern more traffic, content, and users. So whether if you have one or over a thousand content contributors, Drupal can efficaciously cope with a monumental amount of visitors, content, and Drupal users.

Access to robust APIs is one essential ingredient a modern CMS needs if it is to enhance and integrate with all steps of the customer journey. The releases of Drupal 8 and 9 have heralded several such APIs:

• The RESTful Web Services API in Drupal 8 supports a decoupled Drupal site; the communication between native mobile iOS/Android apps and a Drupal site; and, integration with web services.
• JSON:API module allows serialization and communication via JSON.
• Render API enhances the user experience through faster page rendering, and better caching protocols.
• Drupal 8’s Translation API can adjust language on your website depending on where your viewer lives.
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Added to this, Drupal’s API, querying, GraphQL, and microservices models make it easy to mold to almost any architecture with tools and features that improve the experience of both customers, admins, and developers.

Digital integration propels organizations to advance marketing communication across numerous channels. Yet without any automation, tasks — such as emails, social media, analyzing an audience and pushing them the right content at the right time — are time-consuming.

Using modules and tools, Drupal in recent versions means easier integration with automation platforms, which can amass customer demographics to help convert potential leads at the most feasible time.

Want to assign rules for marketing automation in the form of drip campaigns triggered from user interaction? If visitors to your site download a whitepaper, modules allow you to assign rules for automated marketing to these prospects; sending an email offer regarding an abandoned cart, assigning them to a particular list, or have an AI applications such as a chat bot to deliver information.

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Drupal can help with your results, including:

• Real-time sales alerts
• Data management in bulk
• Streamlined workflows
• No licensing costs
• Advanced email reporting for specific audiences
• Refinement of your marketing processes
• Less time required for marketing staff

Drupal  has cutting-edge marketing features built into the core and a myriad of contributed modules helpful in every aspect of your successful marketing. 

Drupal  modules to integrate marketing tools

• HubSpot
• MailChimp
• Google Analytics
• Marketo MA
• Salesforce Suite
• Crazy Egg Integration

and many more.

Learning Drupal can feel daunting. Its ecosystem is like a rich forest with all kinds of fruit and wildlife, but for those who aren't experienced in exploring it, the foliage can look thick, dark, and foreboding. The sounds drifting from the trees seem mysterious and enchanting. But also a little dangerous. You know there are paths through the woods, but some aren't well-marked, and some lead to dead ends. Some take you the long way around and then loop back on themselves. If you want to become a Drupal developer, what path should you take to explore the vast Drupal ecosystem?

If you are interested in becoming a Drupal professional, there are a variety of paths you can take to becoming a marketable Drupal developer. Whether you choose to embark on self-instruction, subscribe to learning videos, or enroll in Drupal career training, we suggest you develop a path that will allow you to focus on the backbone of Drupal success:

1. Skills – Learn, understand & begin working well with Drupal
   • Install Acquia dev desktop and begin to play with Drupal
   • Research and sample Drupal training and learning resources
   • Find workshops and attend beginner sessions at Drupal Events
   • Check out Drupalize.me and their amazing inventory of tutorials
2. Community – Become acquainted & participate
   • Register at Drupal.org and discover what the community is up to.
   • Participate in Drupal events such as forums, regional camps, and local meet ups
   • Find a Drupal group that speaks to your interests and engage
3. Experience – Get practical experience in building Drupal projects
   • Once you have the foundational skills, build a website
   • Participate on Drupal.org by writing documentation and testing
   • Find a company that might want your services as an intern

One of the most popular and powerful Content Management Systems (CMS), Drupal has proven to be a perfect fit for businesses at all scale levels, from very small start-ups to very large organizations. It is imperative that you take calculated risks in order to create successful businesses. You minimize your risks when you choose Drupal as your CMS framework since it is one of the most trustworthy and reliable frameworks with high flexibility.

Drupal has been adopted by many large organizations, including Tesla, GE, Whole Foods, NASA, University of Oxford, NBC, NASDAQ, Harvard University, Universal Music Group, and many others. In light of the fact these big names trust Drupal for their web content and functions, let's see why Drupal can be a good fit for your business.

Cost effective

An open-source framework has its perks and one of them is free downloads. Drupal is distributed under the GNU public license, so anyone can download, use, and extend it for free. It comes with no license fees. No matter what your company size is - cutting costs is always a good thing, right? Next step, hire an experienced Drupal development team to build and deploy your dream website. By reducing software licensing costs, you will be able to provide a more opulent online experience to your users.

Grows with your business

You will eventually need to scale your website to accommodate the needs of your medium, large or small businesses as they become more successful. Websites built with Drupal can grow along with your company. High traffic websites like Tesla, CNBC, NBA, TripAdvisor, Pinterest Newsroom, New York State and more trust Drupal to deliver powerful performances even with surging traffic. 

We can now turn our attention to Drupal's performance and functionality scalability. Today, there are over 40,000 ready-to-use modules available in Drupal to extend the functionality and features of your website. Modules like Forums, blogs, slideshow galleries, etc. can easily be added and integrated with external APIs to expand your website's functionality. Drupal’s extensive templating engine and the 2500+ available themes can help you meet your UX Design goals that will reflect your brand image. 

Security goals

Web security is a significant part of a business plan, however, many companies tend to overlook this crucial issue until something goes wrong. Of course, securing your website is not a one-time task. It is an ongoing process which needs continuous vigilance, updates and maintenance. Drupal is known for the security it offers and is the most secure CMS available today. The security team is always actively protecting the software from harmful attacks and releases regular patches, bug fixes and updates. There are tons of modules and out-of-the-box features that can further help build a secure website like Password protection, Two factor authentication, Content access, Captcha, Security kit and more. No wonder Drupal is the most preferred CMS for over 150+ countries government and intergovernmental websites who deal with highly sensitive data.

Optimize for search engines

Search Engine Optimization is key to every organization’s visibility and is a crucial element for its online marketing strategy. Websites powered by Drupal are proven to get more traffic than any other CMS. How? Drupal offers a bunch of modules and features that are specifically designed to boost your SEO ranking. For example, SEO optimized URLs make pages easily index-able for search engines. Drupal’s taxonomy features when combined with its content editing modules like CCK and Views module, ensures a strong search engine optimized website. With a seamless integration with Google analytics, you can keep a track of your clicks and analytics that can in-turn help you optimize your Drupal website better. Modules like SEO Checklist can help you better organize and maintain your SEO activities.

Flexible Integrations

Along with a powerful website, businesses leverage more than one third-party tool for business process automation. For example, Mailchimp for sending out newsletter and email campaigns, different CRMs to track customer relations and interactions, Learning Management Systems (LMS) tools to handle all learning aspects, Marketo for marketing automation, and the list can go on. Drupal gives you the flexibility to integrate with any third-party application of your choice with the help of integration modules and APIs. Since Drupal’s adoption of the API-first approach, exchanging data with external APIs is now easy and quick. 

Security

Since Drupal is an open-source system, many people wonder whether it's safe. Drupal is carefully tested by Drupal experts, and they are keeping it extremely secure. The information is constantly transmitted, passwords are encrypted, the community reviews the modules ... all these are the reasons that Drupal is one of the safest CMSs in the world. That is why it is used by a large number of organizations that have sensitive data such as the White House, UNESCO, Tesla Motors and others.

Open Web Application Security Project

Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a non-profit charitable organization that regularizes a software’s security and is focused on it’s improving. Drupal is designed to meet OWASP standards and is actively analyzed to prevent future risks.  

Security Team

The Drupal security team is a team of 40 security experts that come from different countries across three continents. They work to improve the security; their job is to identify the security vulnerabilities and make security patches. To prevent security-related fractures in code, they publish the documentation of the identified vulnerabilities and security advisories on its website.  

Password

When Drupal is installed for the first time, the password that we store is encrypted in the database. Characters are added to the password, this is said to be salt and then closed, which is a mathematical one-way function. This is a complicated procedure with the powerful SHA512 function. By doing this, the password is virtually impossible to decrypt.

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A Secure Codebase

An experienced Drupal security team is committed to the reliability and security of Drupal as an open source database. Each module contributed by the user is pre-approved by Drupal's maintainers. Then, the whole community can download the code and report any errors. Thus, each module is thoroughly reviewed by the community.

Access controls

You can configure your access control with full control level in each case. For all situations, you can set up several account types. Thus, users are limited to exclusively their role they perform. It does so without any errors, which in turn increases the security of the application.

Database encryption

By using Drupal, it is possible to encrypt a database. It can be configured to encrypt the entire site's database or only its specific parts. Such encryption types allow the Drupal configuration to pass any of the privacy standards or encryption laws.

Security reporting

CMS is the most secure if our website is properly configured and constantly updated. Drupal notifies you of updates, but at the same time reports you details of updating, so that potential security holes can be immediately corrected and there is no harm.

Drupal  and Third Party Integrations

The ability of the open source technologies to be able to integrate with the enterprise and third party applications, in the current fast paced technologically advancing times, is not a niche but at times the basic building blocks of developing the information and business processes for an organization consisting of various different software systems.

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Drupal, being one of such technologies, has seen significant adoption and acceptance among enterprises because of its innate strength to integrate with the third party applications and systems catering to varied verticals and industries. Drupal’s highly modular and scalable architecture is what makes this possible. At times Drupal needs to be integrated with connectors or adapters which act as a critical component to the integration architecture.

All the integration requirements are handled easily in Drupal with the highly extensive Library API and a very robust and extensible Services layer which also ensures that the consumption of APIs from external systems happens smoothly. Drupal’s amazing and ever growing community contributes generic modules for specific integration requirements.

Drupal and Analytics Platforms

Drupal integrates with various well known analytics platforms. Components of the analytics server can be rendered in Drupal. Also the database systems of Drupal can be exposed to the analytics platforms to be able to use the data for analysis. Some of the commonly used platforms with which Drupal integrates with are Google Analytics, Tableau, Mixpanel, KISSMetrics and WebTrends.

Drupal and E-commerce Vertical

Ecommerce as a vertical has interactions of various different systems with each other to present a fully functional business process. This calls for the need of robust communication among different systems such as Order Management, Inventory Management, Product Content Publishing, Transactions Management, Shipping and Returns Management, Payement Gateway etc. Drupal with its drupal commerce system has the innate expertise to handle all of these and can integrate with systems such as Magento, Authorize.net, Kiala and UPS Shipping.

Drupal and ERP Systems

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is the backbone software of an organization and integrates with all the other systems used in the organization. Drupal has the capability of integrating with almost all the well-known ERP systems available with ready to use generic modules available for integration implementation. If not, Faichi has the expertise needed to write the custom module to implement the same. Drupal integrates with LDAP for authentication processes and takes care of all the security potential threats that may arise in the process. In the article here we have highlighted how Drupal as a system and as a community takes care of security threats. Some of the often used ERP systems are SAP, Sharepoint, Netsuite etc. When integrating Drupal with SAP ERP, Java CAPS, the enterprise service bus software suite from Oracle is used as a connector in the integration process to facilitate in the service oriented architecture environment.

Drupal and Customer Services Vertical

Drupal integrates with the major globally known customer service products and CRMs as well. This kind of integration can be used to provide a seamless login experience to the users and display the forms at Drupal site, the data of which can be used to fetch at the CRM system. Integration can be used to fetch any information from the CRM system to the Drupal site and vice versa. The entities in Drupal are mapped with the objects in the CRM system to execute the integration. Faichi has the expertise of building both the Drupal site as well as the CRM systems which makes us a good fit to carry out such integrations seamlessly. Some of such well known products of customer services vertical are Zendesk, SugarCRM, Salesforce, ExactTarget, Hubspot, Adobe Test and Target and Janrain.

Drupal and EHR Systems

EHR (Electronic Health Record) is electronically storing all the health information of the patients in the digital format to be used by other information systems. Usage of EHR has constantly been increasing in the healthcare industry and rightly so. Integration of Drupal with the EHR system can help in creating a robust system with the strong content management system capabilities coupled with the innate strength of EHR for patients’ documents management. Some of the popular EHR systems in use that can be integrated with Drupal are NueMD, Meditouch, e-MD, PHI etc.

Drupal and Email & Marketing Systems

Any customer facing site or system is incomplete with the email and marketing tools. Drupal has the capability to integrate with the email and marketing systems such as Mailchimp, Marketo, Aprimo, Eloqua, Amazon SES etc. The benefit of integrating the email system in your Drupal site is that one can manage all the email campaigns, email lists etc. of the email system directly in the Drupal site. Adding Marketo to the Drupal site adds marketing automation capabilities to it.

What is a migration?

We use the word "migration" as a generic term for any process that seeks to take data from some source external to the current Drupal site (Drupal 8 or higher) and use it to automatically create nodes, users, configuration, and any other component of your site. In short, automating what might otherwise be a tedious job of copying and pasting.

The core Drupal software includes a migration system whose purpose is to make it easier to import data from a variety of sources. This migration system was introduced and stabilized in Drupal 8 and continues to be improved. The migrate system is both a framework designed to facilitate writing custom migrations, and an implementation of that framework aimed at Drupal-to-Drupal migrations.

The system consists of three core modules: Migrate, Migrate Drupal, and Migrate Drupal UI. Learn more about the role that each fulfills in the Core Migration Modules tutorial, as well as plugins contained by other core modules that make use of the migration framework to ensure the content or configuration they handle has a migration path.

Note: resources labeled with Drupal 8 should work in the latest version of Drupal unless specifically noted.

Upgrade, update, or migrate?

Previous versions of Drupal provided an upgrade mechanism that allowed for in-place version updates, which worked for both major version upgrades, and minor version updates. While convenient, this method also had some significant downsides. Especially tricky was moving between major versions of Drupal. Users often wanted to preserve their existing content, while making changes to take advantage of new systems -- a process that begins to resemble a migration much more than an in-place upgrade.

So now in Drupal there is no direct upgrade from Drupal 6 or 7 to the latest version of Drupal. Instead upgrading to the latest version of Drupal will require you to migrate your site and files from a previous Drupal version (version 7 or lower) to the latest version of Drupal (Drupal 8 or higher). The migrate system in core aims to make this process as easy as possible.

As of right now, the Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI modules provide a way to:

• Connect your destination Drupal site to your Drupal 6 or 7 source
• Extract both the content and configuration
• Transform it into the new format
• Save it into your destination Drupal site using the latest version of Drupal

For example, the Migrate Drupal module is smart enough to understand both Drupal 6 and latest-Drupal nodes, and can extract a Drupal 6 node and all its field data and then save it as a current version of Drupal node. In fact, it's so smart that it'll even take care of migrating the content type definition for you.

You can read more about this change on Drupal.org.

For many people, this is likely what you're looking for: a way to upgrade your older Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 site to the shiny latest version of Drupal. The first part of this guide covers the process of preparing for and executing a Drupal-to-Drupal migration. If this sounds like what you're trying to do, check out the Preparing for a Drupal-to-Drupal Migration tutorial.

Migrate from anywhere

The migration system makes it possible to pull content into Drupal from just about anywhere. The core API supports extraction from any SQL data source, including previous versions of Drupal. Contributed modules extend this system to support other data types like CSV or JSON, as well as other platforms like WordPress.

Some of the existing data sources include:

• MySQL, MariaDB
• Previous versions of Drupal
• CSV
• JSON, you could even use a REST endpoint
• XML
• Etc.

If there isn't already a way to extract the data from your current data store you can write a custom source plugin. Source plugins are the mechanism that allows the Drupal migration framework to understand the ins and outs of extracting data from different data-stores. Source plugins can also be smart about the data-store, for example a WordPress source plugin, written by someone who understands how WordPress works, could be smart enough to dynamically update the fields available for extraction based on the WordPress site in question.

Migrate understands Drupal

When you import data into Drupal you're dealing with entities, fields, and configuration. The migrate framework understands how all of these Drupalisms work, making it possible to save an array of content as a new Drupal user account without having to understand the intricacies of Drupal's database schema, field system, or password hashing algorithms.

The migrate system is smart about things like content type configuration. It will automatically import content into whatever fields you've defined for your application's unique information architecture. And it even knows how to validate the content for each field type prior to saving new data.

Some of the things you can create with a migration include:

• Content (nodes, taxonomy, any generic entity) including any attached files and images
• Content types
• User accounts
• Roles and permissions
• Simple configuration like the site name
• Complex configuration like image styles
• Etc.

The majority of the work that you'll do when writing a migration path is creating migration plugins. Migration plugins are responsible for mapping the data extracted from a source to the Drupal definition of that data. For example, mapping the title and sub-title of an article in your previous CMS to the article node type's title and custom sub-title fields in Drupal. And perhaps opting to transform the data during the import using process plugins.

When reading this guide, it is helpful to have a website building project in mind. The following project scenario provides context and links together the examples in this guide:

You are making a website for a farmers market. The site needs to display information about the location and hours of the market, and an About page with the history of the market. It also needs to list the vendors. Vendors should be able to edit their listings (including a logo or photo), and post recipes. Site visitors should be able to browse recipes, or locate recipes using ingredients that they purchased at the market. Some visitors to your site speak another language, so the main pages and vendor pages need to be translated.

As you read through the guide and try out the tasks it describes, you may choose to follow the scenario exactly; you could also modify the tasks to suit your purposes. If you do want to follow the scenario exactly, you’ll find that you need some image files, which are located in the assets directory of the .zip or .tgz file download available on the User Guide project page.