If you’re a content editor, web developer, webmaster, content marketing specialist, or marketing automation expert, then you have probably used Drupal. It is a powerful and robust CMS (content management system) that has transformed many organizations and enabled them to manage their content and web applications with finesse.
Content strategies and Marketers are no longer needed to rely on the IT team to create, publish, and manage their content. Drupal enables you to offer personalized content, publish workflows, blogs, and videos, and manage social media integrations. But the scope of Drupal is not limited to content management only, it is much wider than that.
In this blog we will discuss several aspects such as Automation, Security, Quality Assurance, and Maintainability, that can be achieved using Drupal.
Do you know how to manage the veracity of your technology ecosystem without stressing your IT team or consuming resources overwhelmingly?
Well, there is just one word for that, Automation.
Drupal is an open-source platform, it offers enormous opportunities for business owners to develop custom integrations that can considerably decrease the workload and assist with business process automation. Lots of SAAS (software as a service) platforms provide applications, APIs, and plugins that can be integrated with an existing system.
However, when a business requires process automation or 3rd party integration, these platforms fail to pan out. This is where Drupal comes to the rescue, due to its open-source nature, it helps your business to perform automation and 3rd party integrations with ease.
All it starts from defining the important elements of your business, which follows with documenting the most important scenarios of implementing the business process automation.
Then you must think about your automation checklist and budget while ensuring all your assets are duly protected. Thereafter you can start automating the business workflows with the help of Drupal.
You can utilize the following Drupal modules to automate your business processes :
Drupal allows easy integration with other CRM platforms. It comes with specialized modules, that help you to directly integrate with other CRMs and avail their additional capabilities to offer an exceptional experience to the customers.
It is a marketing and CRM automation tool, that facilitates the webform submission via HubSpot leads API, which helps in tracking the sales leads.
It helps you to incorporate the lead tracking capabilities of the Marketo Automation tool in your CRM. It comes with class-leading user registration and Webform integration capabilities, that enhance the automatic lead capturing ability of your website.
You can sync your eBay and Amazon account with the Drupal store. If you’re adding or removing selling items, then this module will automatically sync both stores.
It is an exceptional email marketing tool, that helps you automate your customer interaction. You can integrate this module with your Drupal website, it prepares lists that could be synced from your website
Drupal is gaining unprecedented prominence as organizations are expanding their digital transformation and marketing priorities. Drupal is complementing the market demand by launching innovative modules, business customization options, and web functionalities.
However, the web and information security are the areas where the tech world is putting more focus these days. Drupal is catering the security concerns by releasing security updates frequently, which enables you to maintain security of your applications and data
Here it is important to understand that every update is indeed a system integration challenge for any business. Drupal enables developers to validate the security updates to keep your web app functionality intact, features secured, bug-free, and compatible with other frameworks and emerging technologies.
The drupal community is rigorously working to ensure continuous delivery of security updates and features so that your websites and web applications remain secure from threats and vulnerabilities.
Here are a few Drupal modules, that can be used to enhance the security of your websites and web applications :
This Drupal tool assists developers to evade adding disorganized code directly to their contributed module. It scans all the themes and modules available on your website, downloads them, and compares them with prevailing modules to ensure all themes and modules are in fitting shape.
It is a collection of tools to counter several security vulnerabilities such as Cross-site Request Forgery, Cross-site scripting, SSL/TLS, and Clickjacking. It helps you to mitigate several common and severe risks and improves the overall security of your sites and apps.
This Drupal module offers an administrative user interface to manage and maintain users based on User-IP and UID. It provides several configuration settings to enable or disable user access based on the number of erroneous hits by users’ IP/DP.
Drupal core offers a robust shield mechanism, that protects users with five unsuccessful logins hit. In event of wrong hits, the users get blocked for a specific duration.
This module performs a basic check to identify the mistakes committed while setting up a Drupal website. All you need is to enable this module and it runs automatically, performs security scans, and returns the results. It doesn’t fix the errors hence you have to manually fix them.
This module enforces the users to adhere to an organization’s policy while setting up the password. A website or web app with feeble security implementation can lead to hacker attacks and data theft.
This tool addresses the password-related concerns of an organization, as it forces users to set up a difficult password to ensure adequate web security.
Most people think about building digital assets when you talk to them about coding. However, if you are not paying attention to code monitoring, analysis, and bug fixing, then you may put your business at risk.
That’s where your quality standards come into the picture. While developing a web application or website, it is important to ensure adequate product quality to prevent any loophole in your app code, else it may lead to financial risk or customer dissatisfaction.
You must ensure no adverse impact on your application while pushing the codes and updates.
Unfortunately, most website owners are quite unenthusiastic to invest in web-quality activities. However, they ignore the very important aspect of Quality Standards and Quality Assurance, which could hamper their business operations, reputation, and customer experience.
Drupal addresses all these concerns it offers the industry’s best practices to enhance the website and web application quality. Drupal’s open-source and Object-oriented approach enables developers to adhere to global coding standards such as GDPR.
Organizations can align their codes with the global data privacy requirements and evaluate their quality assurance and quality standard needs.
Here are a few best practices to maintain Quality Standards and Assurance using Drupal :
Drupal web development requires clearly defined planning while identifying the business goals and drivers for the project.
We must agree upon performance metrics that will be used as a reference while evaluating the performance of your website or web application. You must relate your quality assurance and control activities directly to these performance metrics and business goals.
For Drupal web development, we should use Sprint Planning to validate if all user stories are lined up for the sprint.
The acceptance measures help you to establish the quality standards for your user story and it also acts as the evaluation parameters to test the user story.
Without having a detailed acceptance criterion in place, the team may implement the wrong approach for problem-solving.
Drupal developers can utilize open-source BLT tools to impose industry-wide best coding standards in development environments.
This helps them to identify small errors before submitting them for integration. It also develops code consistency, which assists quality engineers to review the code faster and perform efficient debugging.
To offer adequate software quality, the project team must include a Drupal practitioner to develop an architecture of your proposed solution. You must manually review your code, execute automated tests, and perform manual testing steps for each user story.
Automation is certainly a key to success to implement robust quality control. You can utilize several tools to automate code testing, its integration with other components, and deployment on various environments.
What is the significance of Website Maintainability? What is the outcome of support and website maintenance?
Well, the answer is very simple. We do perform website maintainability activities to prevent any problems in the future and weed out any issues in the production environment. This is an extremely important activity, as it helps you buy peace of mind.
As your website has been launched and running, you would take certain steps to maintain it to ensure uninterrupted services to your customers. To maintain your website, you must keep a close eye on all aspects such as its performance, appearance, technical constraints, and many more.
Drupal offers a set of contributed themes that transform the appearance of your website. Drupal has replaced the PHP template engine with an all-new Twig template, that gives you enormous possibilities to reshape your website and enhance user experience.
Drupal has taken the web development market by storm due to its exceptional offerings and capabilities. Depending on your business requirements, Drupal enables you to Automate processes, improve security, enhance Software Quality, and adequately maintain your website.
Drupal has emerged as an extremely flexible and powerful platform, and it comes with reliable and secure modules, which help you to achieve your business objectives.
Your primary task is to set your priorities right, and then engage a Drupal development organization that can understand your business workflows and builds the solution accordingly.
If you are tired of experiencing problems and finding a suitable Drupal development organization, then you can contact our Drupal Experts for further discussion.
Arka Softwares is a renowned and reliable Drupal development company, we understand all ins and outs of Drupal CMS and leverage our experience to deliver cost-effective but high-quality solutions for our clients.