Discoverable Components

Drupal has tens of thousands of pre-built modules to help developers and marketers create digital experiences. Teams creating digital experiences can easily explore all the available options for their digital experience platform (DXP) and how to use them. Drupal.org’s module repository, a component marketplace; Drupal.org’s distribution marketplace, a marketplace for packaged business capabilities; and Drupal’s project browser enable developers and business users to discover and install Drupal modules from within the CMS’s administrative user interface.

Orchestrated Components

Drupal offers more than 1,000 packaged business capabilities, called distributions or recipes, which combine Drupal modules into higher-level building blocks to make it easy to deliver solutions in a repeatable manner. Distributions and recipes do not only combine modules, they ship with data schemas, configuration information, content, and data required to make everything work well together. A few of these include Open Social for knowledge-sharing and community websites, Commerce Kickstart for commerce solutions, and Thunder for building magazine websites.

Customizable Project Templates

Why start with a blank page? Drupal provides templates, pre-packaged codebases for a broad range of use cases, giving teams the perfect starting place. Even better, they can create their own templates for their own use cases.

Composable to the Core

Drupal is based on Symfony, the leading PHP framework. Symfony itself consists of many swappable components. Every subsystem is designed to be changed out or replaced as needed.

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) Standards

Drupal follows PHP conventions for object-oriented code, making migrations to Drupal feel familiar to teams who are accustomed to working on OOP stacks. A modern OOP stack enables teams to extend, reuse, and customize every part of the CMS based on the needs of the digital experience. Developers can create custom functionality faster than ever by building on what others have done before.

Everything Is Reusable

Drupal keeps your system DRY (don’t repeat yourself) by making it easy to reuse content, blocks, fields, and media across channels and applications. Update once, populate everywhere.

Fields for Every Need

Quickly assemble and configure data models from dozens of available field types, including rich text fields, link fields, address fields, select list, media fields, maps, and more. Not finding what you need? Create custom field types to do exactly what you need.

Authoring Tools Your Way

Customize the editorial interface for content authors with multiple widget options, tabbed sections, and accordions. Provide smart defaults and granular edit access to field levels if needed.

Powerful Organization

Drupal’s world-class taxonomy system allows users to organize content on the fly as their organization’s content repository grows. Drupal supports free tagging, hierarchical categories, related categories, synonyms, and much more. Best of all, taxonomies are extensible, providing opportunities for even richer data models. Content librarians love Drupal for a reason!

Multiple Output Options

Cards, teasers, full page content, and line item data — Drupal has you covered. Provide multiple view modes for each content type. Best of all, you can output this in HTML, JSON, XML, and more.

Role-Based Access Control

All Drupal access is based on customizable roles and permissions. Roles are additive, letting you manage complex access and management permissions with ease. Organizations can build granular permissions down to the field level.

Advanced Security Features

Password policy and reset rules, IP allow-lists and deny-lists, audit log settings, and more security features help organizations to meet any guidelines they need. This adaptable system is built with your evolving security needs in mind.

Secure by Design

Core-level abstractions and security checks ensure that the most common attack vectors are blocked by default. Custom code that follows best practices and relies on these core systems maintains the same protection.

Expert Security Team

The Drupal project has a 20+ person security team that handles confidential reports of security problems and reviews covered modules. Acquia layers on additional security oversight and governance.

Module Security Coverage

Maintainers of community modules can opt into security coverage from a Drupal security team, who respond to security problem reports. These modules are clearly marked, so enhanced coverage is unmistakable.

Steward Program and Risk Mitigation

Drupal Steward is a web application firewall managed by the Drupal security team and Drupal Association to bridge the gap between the time when a security release is announced and when organizations update their sites with the new security patch. In the event of a highly critical security update, the Drupal security team publishes a notification in advance to warn Drupal Steward participants. Acquia is a Drupal Steward founding member.

Vertical and Horizontal Scaling

Sophisticated caching and data modeling capabilities make Drupal the right CMS for complex websites to run at scale. CMSs designed to support blogs and simple websites cannot achieve the same results. 

Drupal scales vertically to increase the capacity of a website to accommodate more users, while minimizing the addition of server resources. This benefits organizations by maintaining outstanding performance and without a proportionate increase in expenses. 

It also scales horizontally to decrease the load on the server, increasing the performance of the system and application. Drupal is built to support load balancing, ensuring there’s no single point of failure, even when the application scales to support millions of page views.

Flexible, Authenticated Caching Made Easy

The Drupal community developed one of the most advanced caching systems available and it's ready to go, out of the box. The pluggable caching system offers multiple strategies for caching from the traditional time-based method to more modern cache tagging and automated content triggers. Or, you can create your own custom approach.

Nearly all content management systems struggle to cache and scale content for authenticated users, but Drupal doesn't. Drupal maintains extensive cacheability metadata that enables caching of all users' content. Combined with built-in BigPipe support, this provides the fastest and most scalable way to deliver content to authenticated users.

BigPipe

Deliver page content faster by sending cached content first and streaming the personalized content as it’s rendered later. The BigPipe technique is implemented in Drupal core and integrated with the provided caching methods.

CDN Support With Purging

Delivering content from the edge is only helpful when it’s the most recent version. Purging rules trigger on content updates and bubble up through all layers, so stale data is gone, automatically bringing in fresh data.

Static Site Generation

When you want to generate static content for your application, popular tools like Next.js, Gatsby, and Jekyll have prebuilt integrations with Drupal. There are also community solutions that can provide even easier ways to generate static content.

JavaScript and CSS Aggregation

Optimized JavaScript and CSS aggregation is available by default in Drupal, with smart chunking to ensure that each page load gets the assets it needs as cacheable and reusable files. You can also command granular control over advanced aggregation settings to really fine-tune things your way.

Global Language

Organizations can install Drupal in 94 languages and deliver localized content to global audiences. Drupal ships with advanced content workflows to support and manage your translation efforts. With Drupal, you can assign languages to everything and create language-dependent page elements to guarantee a flawless multilingual experience.

Translated Interface

When translating content, organizations often focus on content consumers — citizens, students, customers, end users — and not content creators. Yet not all content creators speak the same language. In Drupal, you can translate the UI to make it user-friendly for all content creators.

Multilingual Content Handling Flexibility

Get granular with your translation with field-level content translation configuration. Visualize your translations to make site building in multiple languages easy.

Configuration Text Translation

Translate configuration text for your pages from the site’s primary language to your desired language. This works for all configuration text and is executed in a translation UI. The best part? All shipped configuration is pre-translatable.

Multilingual Sitemaps

Build a sitemap with your most important pages so that search engines crawl your site and understand page hierarchy. It generates multilingual sitemaps for entities, views, and custom links to help optimize SEO across your entire digital estate.

Core Modules and Themes

Drupal core is built to be accessible by default. This means that features specifically designed to support accessibility are typically enabled and Drupal core themes have been developed with accessibility in mind. The new frontend theme in Drupal 10, Olivero, is WCAG AA conformant.

Automated Testing

Drupal uses automated testing extensively. Tools used include WebAIM’s WAVE, Deque’s axe, and Microsoft’s Accessibility Insights. Because automated tools and checklists have limitations, manual testing and input from users with lived experience is also required to build an inclusive experience.

Assistive Technology

Drupal encourages the use of semantic markup as the best way to produce robust digital experiences that adapt to individual users’ assistive technologies. Examples include support for:

• Text-to-speech tools like screen readers
• Speech-to-text tools
• Aural alerts to provide instructions through screen readers
• Hardware inputs such as keyboards and switch devices 
• High-color contrast
• Screen magnification tools
• Focus states to help users understand which element they are working on
• Many browser extensions

HTML and ARIA

Drupal semantics are defined with modern HTML5 and WAI Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA or ARIA). Drupal uses ARIA landmarks to highlight the page regions, although the Drupal community tries to limit the use of ARIA where possible, finding that HTML generally provides more consistent support with assistive technologies.

Accessibility Team

All of these are supported by Drupal’s accessibility team, which has worked to identify and resolve accessibility barriers during the development process. Any software will have some accessibility barriers, so the challenge is proactively identifying those issues and quickly resolving them.