Economy Provides Even More Incentive to Consider Drupal

Economic conditions have provided additional incentive for IT decision makers to explore open source technologies.  Shrinking revenue streams have forced business to conserve cash.  Using open source represents one way to do so, since not only are licensing fees eliminated, open source technologies can often be leveraged and supported at lower cost and with more widely available resources than can either proprietary or custom-built solutions.

Fact is, economic conditions aside, open source has done more to satisfy market demand for some web technologies than have proprietary solutions.  (This is not to imply, of course, that commercial interests are not to be credited for doing their part in the ongoing evolution and improvement of open source efforts.  Even the most self-serving of institutions have positively influenced the quality of open source software when they have found it profitable to do so.  Market forces are not irrelevant in the open source world.) Drupal, an open source content management system, has shown itself to be extremely competitive in the categories of elegance and feature set compared to its commercial counterparts.  Having worked for years with a multitude of custom and commercial proprietary solutions, I can say with confidence that I never encountered a system that is as inviting to work with from a developer's perspective as is Drupal.

If you are considering the acquisition of a content management solution, I think it would be irrational not to spend some quality time with Drupal as part of your decision-making process.