drupal

WordPress has come a long way since it was launched back in 2003.

From a simple blogging platform it has evolved into a powerful and highly customizable CMS, a fully fledged complex website solution. Moreover, over the past five years it has gained a significant share of the CMS market, with about 60% of all websites running it as their CMS.

While competing CMS solutions, like Drupal and Joomla have continued to trend downwards, WordPress has been gaining worldwide appreciation from both, end users and developers thanks to a continuous process of innovation.

Let’s take a closer look at the plain facts, to understand the CMS market evolution up to 2019, according to statistics:

• MS Market share: 60.2% WP, 6.3% Joomla and 4.4% Drupal.
• Number of live sites (estimated): 75.000.000 WP, 2.000.000 Joomla, 1.000.000 Drupal
• All web: 34% WP, 4% Joomla, 2% Drupal

As you can see above, the numbers are pretty astonishing.
As active participants in the design and development space for more than 10 years, we’ve been working with, customizing and implementing all of the above systems into client projects.
Each of them has their own strengths and weaknesses depending on project, however, as it stands today, WordPress is by far the most intuitive, versatile and cost effective CMS out of the box.

From our experience, in the last few years, a lot of Drupal CMS projects have been replaced by WordPress. We do migrations from Drupal to WordPress regularly now, a major change from a few years ago, when the opposite was a lot more common.

Businesses and developers slowly moved away from Drupal and focused on WordPress, due to its increased ease of use, modularity and highly efficient plug and play plugins, intuitive publishing system and content administration.

While each new version of WordPress focuses on enhancing performance, flexibility and usability, bringing new features and simplifying administration and development, the latest version of Drupal, Drupal 8, really managed to mess things up.

Drupal not only changed the whole implementation model for developers, but became more difficult to work with overall, buggy and with a lack of basic core functionalities. One example is the need to write custom code or install third party modules, just to open a link in a new browser tab.

In a stark direct contracts to Drupal, WordPress offers extensive flexibility and versatility and comes with ton of features out of the box, that cover almost any functionality a website might need.

It’s pretty easy and straight forward to work with from an end-user perspective: if you need an online store, you just install and configure WooCommerce; you need a forum or community, just add BBpress or BuddyPress to the mix. Easy, reliable, clean development, intuitive administration system, reliable support.

Moreover, as said before, using WordPress to power a website is much more cost effective than using pretty much any other CMS currently available. The development cycle is not that time consuming, testing is cleaner and easier, updates and upgrades can be done on the fly and without extensive maintenance and downtime.
Also, the overall back-end administration system is more user friendly and most features are focused on usability.

In summary, the advantages of using WordPress are many, from lower development costs, an easy management and publishing system to multiple functionalities. WP can be used for basic presentation sites, as well as advanced custom and complex web applications, forums, data collection platforms, e-commerce stores and more.

We highly recommend it here at VerticalWave and if you happen to need some help with a new or existing website project, don’t be shy and give us a shout.

Cheers.

We’re proud to announce the launch of our latest project, The Institute of Global Homeless Hub (IGHhub) website. Backed by The Institute of Global Homeless, the Hub is designed as a multi-purpose platform to serve researchers, practitioners, and policymakers across the globe and it addresses world-wide audience. It helps connect ideas, effective practice, policies, data and more in an admirable effort to eradicate street homelessness at a global level.

The platform is powered by the powerful Drupal content management system, it incorporates the latest tech features for advanced flexibility and usability and uses a custom, responsive design which renders perfectly on laptops, desktops and mobile devices, on virtually any screen size and resolution.

The IGHHub features a friendly back-end user interface, which allows administrators and editors add tons of content, media items, files and more with a few clicks. The large database is easy to manage and a custom search engine, based on Solr, grants quick access to any piece of content.

Moreover, the content adding, editing and deletion system is optimized for fast publication and updating. The entire content and user database is highly protected and backed up regularly to prevent data alteration of any kind. VerticalWave Solutions also provides ongoing maintenance and support for the entire project.

We’re sure that with a powerful tool like the Hub platform to serve their needs, the guys at The Institute of Global Homeless will be able to fight homelessness in a much more efficient and productive way.

The VerticalWave Solutions team is proud to announce the launch of E-Mentoring Halton, a new generation type of collaboration platform, dedicated to provide online mentoring partnerships for residents of Halton Region. It is a complex program, designed to bridge the gap between established professionals and professionals immigrating to the Region of Halton in occupational-specific mentoring relationships. Moreover, the platform is engineered to facilitate communication between program participants, across the world at any time zone.

This is a scalable system, tailored to put the most efficient collaboration, communication and sharing tools at the fingertips of e-Mentors and e-Mentees. The challenge was to merge all functionality features with an intuitive and easy to use design for the end-user and for system administrators.

Using the powerful Drupal CMS, our team successfully implemented a wide variety of functional features and a modern responsive design, combining state of the art mobile and desktop UI and UX into an interactive and secure specialty platform.

E-Mentoring Halton boasts an innovative resource sharing system, which provides users with access to documents, videos, links and notes. Users have the possibility to communicate via comments or the integrated instant messaging system. At the same time they can schedule meetings and calls to enhance their collaboration and reach the end goal easier, while a built-in notification system alerts users and administrators of various activities via email.

System administrators can easily designate groups and associate users with them and create specific modules, tasks and evaluations for each group and user. Moreover, the content and user management system is designed to provide easy admin access to all resources and user accounts. Administrators control the back-end and entire collaboration system in a very straight-forward way to ensure the lowest interaction latency time possible.

As said, the E-Mentoring Halton platform is based on custom functionalities and employs many features, but using the latest Drupal 7 installment, combined with custom built modules, a clean and well-structured programming code and a solid database system, our team has delivered a modern, customizable and reliable solution for the client.

The Vertical Wave Solutions team is proud to announce the launch of C.D. Howe Institute’s new website. With the mission to raise living standards by fostering economically sound public policies, the C.D. Howe Institute is a prestigious, independent not-for-profit research organization, considered by many to be Canada’s most influential think tank.

According to the Institute’s requirements, our VerticalWave Solutions team migrated the original website content from an old platform to Drupal CMS, created a fresh and modern look for the new website, as well as improved the administration and content management procedures for the client. The challenge was to create a new, visually appealing website, rich in features and easy to manage, while staying true to CD Howe Institute’s brand and substance. Our team successfully delivered a website that met all these principles.

The new website features a modern, responsive design, which renders perfectly on desktops, laptops and mobile devices, boasting a user friendly front end interface which makes browsing simple and intuitive, and provides fast access to content. The C.D Howe Institute website now integrates complex features like subscription system, advanced search, structured library, event management platform, third party service integration, dynamic featured content and more.

Backed up by a user-oriented and easy to use back-end administration system, as well as by an organized structure, the site can be easily managed without advanced technical skills. We are proud to have put technology in the right form, right at our client’s finger tips.

VerticalWave Solutions also provides ongoing support and maintenance for C.D. Howe.

Benefitting from a large support community, Drupal is one of the most widely used content management systems today. It is the perfect CMS for personal, corporate or government sites and has multiple uses, from simple presentation websites to custom community or e-commerce platforms. Drupal is intuitive, highly secure, SEO-friendly, mobile-friendly, easy to integrate with existing code and more.

One of the major advantages of using Drupal as your content management system is that it can adapt to virtually any browser and operating system without hassle. It saves you time and money when it comes to render your site’s content on all popular browsers like Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and on the widely used Windows, MacOS and Linux OS platforms. It also works perfectly on less known and used browsers and operating systems.

The great thing about Drupal is that it is backwards compatible. That means that it can easily adapt to previous versions of a particular browser or OS. Other CMSs have the same feature too, but their compatibility can be limited and require longer development time to adapt to older OS and browser versions. On the other hand, Drupal offers a perfect browsing experience (both in terms of graphics and functionality) with just minor tweaks.

It is always recommended to use the latest OS and browser version available, but many users ignore this recommendation. The use the systems they are accustomed with their favorite plugins to or are not interesting in upgrading. This is why Drupal comes in handy and helps you reach a wider audience. And remember that Drupal offers a superior and user-friendly browsing experience on mobile devices running Android and iOS too.

As Drupal is one of the most versatile content management systems today, it is widely used for corporate, e-commerce, government and a wide range of other projects and sites. Drupal is a highly secure, highly scalable CMS which empowers web presence for a multitude of projects.

Flexibility, easy administration, possibility to integrate with existent and future modules and pieces of code, intelligent web publishing, mobile friendliness, huge support community and multilingual capabilities are just a few of the features that make Drupal such a popular and widely used CMS.

Let’s take a look at who uses Drupal:
– The White House: www.whitehouse.gov
– The Economist: www.economist.com
– Oxfam: www.oxfam.org
– The French Government: www.gouvernement.fr
– Eric Clapton: www.ericclapton.com
– Fujifilm: www.fujifilm.com
– The British Government: www.direct.gov.uk
– The Louvre Museum: www.louvre.fr
– Ikea: www.ikea.com
– Chris Rock: www.chrisrock.com
– ING: www.ing.com
– Rafael Nadal: www.rafaelnadal.com

And the list goes on. As you can see, governments, major institutions and corporations and famous artists use and trust Drupal. This makes it one of the most legitimate and trustworthy CMSs on the market.

By now we already know that Drupal is a very efficient content management system, able to meet personal and corporate needs, a reliable way to empower your presence on the internet. Its modules are highly scalable and provide you with access to the latest web technologies.

But Drupal is much more than a simple and efficient CMS. It is a tool that will boost you ROI rate from the first moment you deploy your website on the internet. Let’s see how this is possible.

First of all, Drupal is easy to configure and does not require dedicated admins to run the website. This means that after the site is created, you or anyone else can manage it without any hassle. With little training, you are in complete control of your website.

At the same time, Drupal has powerful SEO modules that can help you increase your visibility on the internet at a fast pace. The better the visibility, the more visitors you get imp source. Running SEO campaigns for a Drupal sased website is very efficient. And this translates into cash. Drupal is also easy to integrate with social media, so you can communicate easily with your friends and customers via Facebook, Twitter or any other media platform.

Drupal is a mobile friendly CMS. By using it, the development team can create mobile versions of your website in a short time, or design adaptive or responsive sites that can be managed very easily. This means that you don’t need to create separate apps or spend tons of money on mobile design.

Drupal websites are also easy to maintain, and do not require additional development when it is time to update them. Security updates are also easy to implement and very cost effective. Thanks to its large support community, Drupal is constantly evolving and grants you access to new and rick open source features that will make your site shine on the web.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is something you really need to take into consideration when designing your site. SEO is now an integrated part of the modern web and helps you gain better visibility on search engines. And this translates into more visitors and better business, whether you operate a corporate business or a private one.

And Drupal is by far the best CMS when it comes to search engine optimization. It gathers lots of CMS tools that grant users the ability to control all elements of their SEO campaign. Drupal’s SEO Tools module offers you an all-in-one suite of search engine reporting, analysis and optimization options.

Here are just a few of the features that the Drupal SEO tools offer: Keyword research, management and extraction, Content optimization, reports, tagging and autolinking, Link management, Cornerstone content and silo management, plus SEO architectural enhancements such as page titles, meta tags, global redirect, XML sitemap, Google Analytics w/ API integration, Google Webmaster Tools and more.

There’s no better way to make your site rank high in search engines than using the Drupal CMS and its rich SEO tools. It’s guaranteed to boost your site’s visibility and attract visitors to empower your business.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Drupal being adopted by governments around the world for a variety of projects of different seizes and scope. Words such as openness, transparency and visibility are redefining the ways in which governments are structuring their administrations.
The Open Source social publishing platform Drupal is turning these concepts into reality with successful government projects popping up all over the place. Drupal’s modular framework allows for scallable and collaborative environments while maintaining the security and reliability governments are used to.
Here’s a list of recently launched government related website using Drupal.

Here at VerticalWave, we’ve just started helping government related agencies and organizations such as Echo Ontario: Improving Women’s Health In Ontario adopt Drupal painlessly and successfully. We’re looking forward to working with others in the near future lexapro 20 mg.

We’re excited to announce the release of the new <a title="Echo Ontario" href="http://www a fantastic read.echo-ontario.ca” target=”_blank”>Echo Ontario website & directory on Drupal CMS. Our team has worked tirelessly to deliver this new project on time and budget. Great job guys!
On this project we’ve also managed to integrate Drupal with Microsoft Dynamics CRM online. Real time communication and updating of Echo’s CRM with researcher and health professional profiles from Drupal. Another first for our team.
We’re becoming experts at integrating Drupal with SalesForce and Dynamics. Good times! ?