Seven Transformative Reasons to Use Drupal 8 Right Now
Everything great about Drupal 7 just became a whole lot better. Everything difficult about Drupal 7 just got a whole lot easier. As a platform that can help your organization transform itself around digital business imperatives, Drupal 8 has unparalleled potential. Here are seven transformative reasons for using Drupal (and why Drupal 8 is even better).
1. More than 3,200 Drupal 8 Contributing Developers
Drupal 8 attracts new developers every day who enhance and extend Drupal to meet the challenge of new market drivers faster than any other platform. The great thing about being a Drupal 8 developer? You don’t necessarily have to be a Drupal 7 developer. Drupal 8 represents a significant effort to move away from idiosyncratic Drupalisms based on outdated technologies (which originated for good reasons), and to begin to embrace more modern standards-based practices.
Tip: Get your team engaged with one of the 3,200 Drupal 8 developers to accelerate their own Drupal 8 learning. Visit groups.drupal.org or FFW's event page to get started.
2. Faster Time to Market
Drupal 8’s out-of-the-box features, modular architecture, and open-source code base allow organizations to create new sites quickly and efficiently with little risk and less cost. Everything about Drupal 8 is faster and smarter.
Tip: Read up on all the Drupal 8 improvements and then take it out for a spin with Acquia’s free developer tier or DevDesktop 2.
3. Ownership
Imagine a great CMS, then imagine it goes away. Cisco pulled its EOS content management system off the market because it wasn’t enough of a revenue generator. Clients were stranded with less than a year to transition. What would you do? With open source Drupal, you won’t have that problem.
Tip: Read how Warner Music tackled the ownership problem and used Drupal to never face another product sunset. If that doesn’t impress you, read about how Cisco has been using Drupal and is ready to make a major investment in the project.
4. Innovation & Integration
Drupal 8 makes things practical that were considered impossible before. With Drupal 8, you can build one website that works equally well on a desktop or smartphone. You can power a native phone app with HTML5 elements or completely decouple Drupal 8 to power a web application and replace legacy systems. The money you save on licensing and an unparalleled extensible core platform encourages greater investment in innovation and integration that leads to substantive product and service differentiators.
Tip: Read how Acquia engagement services can help you reach all your channels through a Drupal 8 WCM system.
5. Ease of Adoption
Drupal 8’s administrative layer, workflow, and UI can be customized to align with multiple roles and business processes that accelerate adoption throughout the enterprise. Any developer with a background in full systems and Object-Oriented programming will have an easier time learning Drupal 8 too because it’s built around standards-compliant systems like Symfony.
Tip: Check out this case study featuring Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University to learn how they managed their Drupal adoption challenges through careful training, planning, and services.
6. Scalability
Scalability means different things to different people, and Drupal 8 has something for everyone. From a new configuration system that is faster, easier, and less confusing when deploying to smarter UX and vastly improved caching, Drupal 8 has raised the bar. In caching alone, there is better invalidation and variation, server, and client side substitution.
Tip: Visit Dries Buytaert's post on Making Drupal 8 Fly to read about performance and scalability enhancements in Drupal 8.
7. Flexibility
Drupal 8 is a content and community management system and application platform. It’s new data handling features enable it to power applications that haven’t even been thought of yet. Drupal 8 can do everything Drupal 7 has always done, but better and faster: blogs, websites, web applications, mobile apps, data stores, API’s, retail portals, intranets, governments, ecommerce, knowledge management and learning systems, event organizing systems, forums, social business, networking and group sites, ERPs, SAAS solutions and so much more.
Tip: Install the Wappalyzer or Built With plugins in your browser so you can see what sites you visit are built using Drupal. Attend a Drupal 8 class brought to you by FFW's training sessions to learn how they can be even better.
Get Started With Drupal 8
Ready to get started with Drupal 8 on your next web project? Make sure to check out our Drupal 8 trainings, or contact us to learn how we can help.