We were recently approached by Clutch, the Washington, DC-based research firm focused on the technology, marketing, and digital industries, for an interview about Drupal. The interview is centered around how the platform addresses our clients’ challenges, what types of organizations Drupal best serves, features and drawbacks, development, and how to choose the right CMS.

Our company’s president, Brian Skowron, was the lucky participant and had the opportunity to share his insights as part of Clutch’s expert interview series. This series highlights web agencies’ technical wisdom with the goal of helping other companies learn more about different website platforms’ strengths and limitations as they look to build new sites.

Here are a few highlights from the interview:

Drupal's strengths

Drupal is one of the most widely-known, open-source CMS platforms that is a powerful tool for managing large amounts of content. In the interview, Brian explains that Drupal’s main strengths are its flexibility and ability to be customized:

It’s a powerful platform, and it can do just about anything. It’s very feature-rich in terms of its ability to model content, in terms of editorial capabilities, and in terms of its abilities to accommodate customized workflows and permissions governance.

Choosing the right platform

With so many existing and rapidly emerging content channels, knowing what CMS platform would be the best fit is often challenging. It's important to know the right questions to ask because of the complexity involved with a CMS and all of the stakeholders who use, maintain, and manage it.

Many times, at least within the CMS landscape, people are drawn towards demoable features, whatever may be interesting and unique, but, what’s really important in choosing a platform, is how well it will match the needs of the organization, and the publishing needs of websites and various other channels.

Drupal security

Clutch also asked about Drupal’s security capabilities, an increasingly important topic in today’s insecure world, to which Brian explained that the platform is known as one of the most secure among CMSs. Given its open-source nature, Drupal has a large community of developers behind it ensuring that all security-related issues are resolved to avoid website vulnerabilities. However, he also notes that it’s ultimately up to the end-user to keep their website updated and secure.

Unlike working with proprietary vendor software, where the client is reliant on them to give notifications on and patch any vulnerabilities, Drupal has a team which is constantly working on this. Some of our team members at Lullabot are part of that security committee.

For the end-user of Drupal, the most important thing is to keep their environment up-to-date and patched. These security releases happen on a routine basis, and, as with any software, there is some responsibility on the user side to patch their system. Otherwise, there is a number of security best practices around securely hosting the site, as well as configuring Drupal such that it’s secure.

Read Brian’s full interview and find out how he rated Drupal on functionality, implementation, and more.

Photo by Alejandro Escamilla

Lullabot Featured as Drupal Expert on Clutch

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