Drupal Selling Points

I recently was asked by a client to provide some ammunition for selling Drupal to his management team. I found plenty info using my friend Google, but ultimately had to spend an hour or so organizing it into a concise list of bullet points that I thought addressed the broad spectrum of benefits that Drupal can provide.  I thought I'd share with others who may need something similar at some point.

Without further ado...

First, it's Open Source:

• Supported by a large developer community
• No proprietary licensing fees
• Long-term ROI not tied to performance of a single vendor firm
• Portable
• Transparent security focus
• Advantages over a custom-built system:
  • Resources required to match quality of Drupal code would be enormous
  • Hardened by years of widespread use and developer contributions
  • Extremely secure

The Drupal Advantage

• Most popular and most powerful open-source CMS
  • huge install base
  • massive, active development community

• Drupal is a CMS and an effective application framework
  • clean, extensible code base
  • many high-quality modules available for add-on capability
  • keep custom, proprietary code to a minimum
  • build highly functional custom modules to accomplish practically any task

• High performance
  • built-in caching
  • integrates easily with 3rd party caching mechanisms
  • infinitely scalable

• SEO friendly right out of the box
  • standards-compliant HTML/CSS
  • capable of custom (HTML) page titles, meta descriptions
  • customizable, friendly URLs
  • permalinks
  • simple Google Analytics integration (without writing or inserting code)

• Extremely well documented
• Mature, going into seventh major release
• Flexible, powerful theming engine separates content completely from presentation; a Drupal site's look-and-feel is limited only to the constraints of imagination and the modern web browser.
• Easy to install and support, runs on Windows or practically any AMP (Apache, mySQL, PHP) stack
• Notable Drupal Features and Selling Points
  • Powerful taxonomy system for categorizing content
  • User registration and profiles
  • Role-based permission system
  • Out-of-box RSS feeds
  • Browser-based administration

You'll be in good company.  Web sites running on Drupal include:

• Digett, http://www.digett.com
• The Onion, http://www.theonion.com
• Fast Company, http://www.fastcompany.com
• The Pulitzer Prizes, http://www.pulitzer.org
• Churchill Downs, http://www.churchilldowns.com
• The Kentucky Derby, http://kentuckyderby.com (built by Digett 2004 - 2008)
• Warner Brothers Records, http://www.warnerbrosrecords.com
• AOL Corporate, http://corp.aol.com
• Popular Science, http://www.popsci.com
• thousands more

Updated Post 6/15/2011: Why You Should Use Drupal for Your Next Website Project