Custom Drupal Development

Many of our customers come to us with the same story – “our webhost says the CMS can’t do what we want, that it doesn’t support it, can you guys help us”? It’s a common complaint, non technical users would like to implement some new functionality, but their WWeb Company has settled on an old, outdated and closed-source commercial CMS that simply cannot be edited or added to without paying the CMS’s developers exorbitant sums in custom development fees. The first and most important reason we chose Drupal was to combat this exact issue – Drupal strikes the exact balance between developmental freedom and providing tools to non-technical users.

The foundation of Drupal's framework is the 'core' files, which constitute the stock installation of the software and include all the central modules and building blocks as well as fundamental features. The key to Drupal’s flexibility lies in some of the design decisions taken by the Drupal Core team, and because of these decisions, we are able to implement anything our customers require.

When we are developing a Drupal site, we are building on the core structure by taking advantage of Drupal’s highly modular nature. The default installation of Drupal is little more functional than a basic blog – the vast bulk of of Drupal’s functionality comes from a smorgasbord of modules contributed by both the commercial and open-source community of users and developers. More than 500,000 user accounts have been created on Drupal.org, the application's official website and developer forum. It is difficult to overstate just how important the module community is, but it would never have come to exist if it was not for Drupal’s focus on providing an extremely flexible “framework” to allow developers to start building their own Drupal modules with almost zero effort – it only takes a few lines of code to get started!

Because of Drupal’s open-source nature, we have total developmental control over whatever we do, and the same applies to you - you as the user own and control all the source code. Since DogHouse Media never locks you in to licensing agreements or ongoing charges, you have total freedom to up sticks and take the site elsewhere. This sort of freedom, both in terms of development and lack of commercial lock in means Drupal presents the perfect CMS choice for both us and our customers.