Drupal

Aquatic Systems is one of the leading Lake and Wetland Management companies in the state of Florida. They restore and maintain private, commercial and public lakes, waterways, wetlands and preserves from overgrowth of algae and exotic species, poor water quality, and fish kills. Their former site was a 10-page static HTML site. Their goal was to not only update the look of their website, but to be able to add press releases, articles, and case studies in order to become the online resource for their industry.

This multi-part story is presented for those parties that are contemplating using CiviCRM with Drupal for an online project. The information provided will apply particularly well if you are looking to utilize CiviCRM for running an association or membership group.

Background

It all starts with an idea...

We were approached by a client to build a membership website for their constituents to utilize and assist in marketing the association, to attract new members, and ease the administrative burdens on the association staff. Our team has many years of experience with membership and association websites and this was the primary reason we were chosen for the project. After reviewing the requirements, we quickly realized that the systems we had used in past projects were not going to be adequate for this one without heavy customization and custom coding. After much deliberation, research, discussion and testing we decided that CiviCRM running on Drupal would be our best approach. What follows is the story of our process and our project.

With the announcement of Drupal being used to power WhiteHouse.gov, Drupal has been thrust into the spotlight even more. Its merits of a content management system have already been heralded, but as Drupal matures, people are starting to understand its power even more, and use it for non-CMS uses, such as the recently featured site on Drupal.org, GoTwitr.com. This begs the questions: is Drupal turning into a framework? Is it one already? Should it be?

Drupal as a CMS

Drupal was born as a CMS, and it would be a sad day if it gave up on those roots. This isn't predicted to happen, at least anytime soon. In fact, there has been plenty of work on the user interface in Drupal 7, including extensive UI testing and bringing in UI designers from outside the community to revamp and simplify the administration and content editing experience in Drupal 7. And while there's still an amount of configuration needed to get Drupal running well and tuned to be fast, it's still an out of the box solution that has near-immediate usability as a CMS.

When in need of Content Management System (CMS) for your website you can't go wrong with Drupal.  Several years ago our company was evaluating different options for  (CMS) software for our clients. As with any software selection in today's time there are generally 3 options to pursue: