Open source
The Drupal CMS offers a very readable and clear programming base as well as an open and accessible extension engine (plugins / modules). Its modular structure and the richness of its modules make its architecture particularly suitable for the creation of rich and multi-contributor content platforms. It is free software, freely distributed and released under the General Public License (GPL). The sources are widely documented and the community of contributors particularly large and active. Drupal 8 being based on Symfony (one of the most used PHP frameworks in the world), its community is one of the most important.
Security
Drupal 8 is secure and proven to withstand the most critical vulnerabilities (OWASP Top 10). Non-exhaustive list of security on Drupal 8:
- Secure access: Passwords for ready-to-use Drupal accounts are encrypted. Drupal can support a wide variety of password policies (minimum length, complexity, expiration, etc.)
- Granular user access control
- Database encryption: In high security applications Drupal can be configured for extremely strong database encryption
- Prevention against XSS, CSRF and other malicious data entry attacks
- Détection et protection contre les attaques en force brute
- Denial of Service (DoS) Attack Mitigation
- Dedicated security team, made up of dozens of experts from around the world, who validate and respond to security issues
Performances
Drupal 8 has good cache management inherited from the Symfony Framework, which offers good performance by default. To this, we can add one or more layers of optimizations:
- Cache server (Memcache or Redis) to lighten the load at the database level,
- HTTP cache server (Varnish) to further improve performance
- CDN for static resources The Google PageSpeed (or Yahoo Yslow) score allows you to check the performance of a web application and offers recommendations for optimizations.
Features
A responsive, accessible and multi-browser site:
Responsive design allows websites to automatically adapt to all types of screens (desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc.), according to their specificities.
In addition to adapting the ergonomics of the page, the content can also be adapted for mobile use. Thus, the services accessible from the home page may be different on mobile.
The sites will be accessible to the most common target browsers: Internet Explorer 11 and following (versions 9 and 10 no longer being maintained by their publisher Microsoft) Microsoft Edge Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera (version in progress at the launch of the project and earlier major version)
A comfort message may be offered to Internet users whose browser version is not up to date (based on the http://browsehappy.com directory)
A multilingual site
The site will be multilingual (6 languages: FR, EN, DE, IT, ES, RU) and other languages can be added later as needed. Drupal manages this functionality very well and several strategies can be considered:
Shared edition: content available in a single language can be traced back to all the linguistic versions of the site;
Symmetric editing: the contents are unique and have translated versions. The same content is accessible and visible only if there is a version translated into the language of consultation;
Exclusive edition: each content is associated with one and only one language. Each version of the site has its own content and its own tree structure, there is no link between the translated content.
A tailor-made back office
The back office adapted to your business needs:
Installation of a theme making it easier to get started with the site's content management back-office,
Evaluation and adaptation of content types and fields so that they remain simple to use, while giving great freedom of administration of the pages.
Possibility of administering the sections of transversal elements such as the header, the footer and the menus, for personalized navigation, Addition of functional modules facilitating the editing of content (rich content editor with multiple formatting), Editing functions “Live” allowing content to be edited directly at the front-office, without going through the back-office interface
A back office that facilitates media management
In addition to the text editor, we can provide a media library for reusing uploaded media (images, sounds, pdf, etc.).
These media can be stored in folders and it will be possible to finely restrict their access according to user rights. It will also be possible to crop / resize the images directly via the tool.
The possibility of setting up a multisite
Once the technical base of the main site is in place, it is possible to upgrade it to a multi-site thanks in particular to the “Domain Access” module.
The major advantage is having a single Back-Office for managing the content of satellite sites.
The technical base (Drupal), the configurations, the database and the source code are shared between the various satellite sites.
In order to secure the implementation of a multi-site, a preparation phase must be carried out upstream in order to define in particular:
The types of content shared,
Shared functionalities,
Shared languages,
User groups by domain,
The budget estimate for this option will require a scoping and specifications phase.
SEO optimization
Compliance with the rules decreed by the W3C ipso facto guarantees the quality of the HTML structure of the sites, setting the conditions for good indexing of pages in search engines.
The establishment of a sitemap.xml will also promote reading of sites by indexing engines.
Installing Drupal modules to rewrite URLs (automatically by default, with manual overloading possible) and customize metas will also be a plus. The 404 and 403 pages will be personalized and the robots.txt file correctly filled.
During redesigns, a 301 redirect plan will be drawn up before switching to ensure that all old URLs are redirected to the new ones.
