Drupal is a widely adopted CMS across the globe and is currently in use by large organizations such, The White House, McDonald’s, Twitter, IKEA and many more. The reasons you should choose Drupal among other CMS platforms are endless, but to name a few: wide variety of modules to choose from based on the usage, huge number of developers contributing worldwide, cost effective, evolves with time, enhanced features and functionalities, etc. Because of these wide range of features, progressive institutions, such as Harvard and MIT, have been powered by Drupal for several years
Top Universities that were built with Drupal CMS:
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University of Minnesota (UMN)
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Bentley University
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University of Oxford
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University of Surrey
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Georgetown University
Why Drupal?
1. Multi-Site Functionality
Most universities and colleges maintain multi-facet websites to cater various needs. By using the power of Drupal’s built-in multi-site functionality, institutions can have their departments powered with a toolbox and relevant media types for communicating with students, staff, and other public users via a single system.
2. Easy to go Responsive Design
According to an eMarketer report, approximately 90 percent of US college students will own a smartphone by the time of their graduation in 2016. Now, with the latest release of Drupal 8, academic centres can leverage Drupal to stay up-to-date and connect with their users by delivering smoother, responsive website experiences out of the box. Drupal sites also adapt easily to evolving user patterns in smartphones, making it easy for institutions with high student demographics. It is also much easier for admins to manage content the user dashboard.
3. Workflow Modules
Drupal’s workflow modules and feature set allows universities and colleges to control and manage the publication process, without limiting its use as a mere content management tool. There’s granular control available for every content operation.
4. Content & User Access Control
With the availability of Content and User Access Control, site administrators can create privileges grouped together by role specific access level. These permission sets can be assigned to a fleet of users, rather than manually granting privileges to each individual user. Permission sets help decentralize task responsibilities, like creating, editing, and managing content, all without putting extra workload on your IT hub.
5. Multilingual Awesomeness
With Drupal 8 now available in more than 110 languages, the site can be available in almost any language based on your student demographic needs. The multi-lingual features are of prime importance for focussed groups like international student groups, alumni network, global event communications, focus groups, etc.
6. Single Sign-On
Almost all higher education institutions have a pre existing authentication systems for email or other internal accounts. Drupal leverages LDAP and CAS, so a single sign-on for academic websites are easily done. These single point access integrations offer a secure environment for users who want multiple resources and services via a single login
7. Community Support for Drupal in Higher Education
Anyone interested in building their business site in Drupal can easily be connected with Drupal community groups around the world. One can also easily search the issue queue for questions and answers related to institutes of higher education. Some exclusive community group examples are:
8. Social Media & Email Campaigns
Drupal’s integrated social media capabilities makes web user engagement easier. Drupal can be leveraged to integrate with email marketing services like MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc. IT can also integrate with social media campaigns through Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and more.
9. Drupal’s Multisite Approach
Multisite management needs are common for higher education institutions. Different departments or student initiatives often require sub/sister domains. Drupal’s flexibility and scalability leverage the best of content storage for each website. Sharing different site content can be done with the Domain Accessmodule, allowing configuration, user, and content settings to be managed between or across sites.
10. Quick Edits
Drupal sites for institutions of higher education provide an editing fast track. School event location changes, cancellations, and more can be managed quickly by a novice. With CKEditor, creating media rich content is interesting and time saving. Media management is simplified by the Media Module in Drupal, that helps embed files in your post, makes files fieldable, enabling the use of text fields to store captions on images, taxonomy fields for audio file genres, etc.
11. Security Reasons
Educational sites are often prone to hacker attack trying to breach the security of the system and get access to sensitive data. This drives higher education decision makers choose their digital platform strategically which adhere to best security standards. Open Source Software (OSS) is generally more secure with the best security features, and Drupal is very proactive in this. Drupal’s security army is highly responsive, and proactive, sending frequent security fixes for all actively maintained versions
These are some of the reasons why Drupal is the best when coming to Education institution sites. And Drupal Geeks has a number of educational clients that we have catered over the years.
Reach out to our certified Drupal expert team who can help you in building your educational sites. Give a complete revamp look to your site by building a secure and safe site.