Reasons Why Institutions Of Higher Education Are Preferring Drupal Over WordPress In Their Choice Of A CMS

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Reasons Why Institutions Of Higher Education Are Preferring Drupal Over WordPress In Their Choice Of A CMS
Reasons Why Institutions Of Higher Education Are Preferring Drupal Over WordPress In Their Choice Of A CMS
It is typical of universities to
have a large number of departments that are tasked with the responsibility of
creating and maintaining voluminous content of extremely important nature, such
as research and academic studies. Due to the very powerful governance tools
built into Drupal, its robust architecture, and scalability, it is considered
to be a very good fit for academic institutions. Even though WordPress is
perhaps the most well-known CMS solution with a 60%-plus share of the market,
it does not follow that all customers will find it to be the best solution for
their requirements. Educational institutions, in particular, need to understand
essentials like the platform’s functionality, security, and accessibility
features to figure out whether the CMS package will meet their needs. Some of
the top reasons, including customization and accessibility requirements that
Drupal manages to satisfy better, are examined herewith:

Governance
And Permissions

With its comprehensive site
management and governance tools, and top-order security features, education
institutions consider Drupal as their preferred choice of a CMS platform that
can support the requirements of a large number of departments, each responsible
for creating and maintaining very large volumes of content. Drupal allows
individual departments to set up sites for managing their own functions, for
example, the admissions department to manage their vital tasks. It also permits
safeguarding of content by requiring approvals to be taken by less expert users
or users down the hierarchy to initiate changes. The highly-flexible permission
system permits the site administrators to suit the workflow of the site as per
user requirements while ensuring that the overall content management rules are
not violated by content editors resulting in the pages breaking. The system
speeds up the editing process of the site, removes bottlenecks, and makes sure
that only the content is being updated by the editors, not the design of the
content, which helps to preserve the integrity of the brand.

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Accessibility

Almost all higher education
institutions give very high priority to accessibility to the CMS. This on
account of two primary reasons; firstly, the institutes want to ensure a high
degree of user-friendliness, and secondly, the high level of accessibility
enables them to comply with their guidelines. In the typical WordPress
vs. Drupal
comparison scenario, Drupal 8 scores very high in the matter of
accessibility because it offers a large number of out of the box capabilities
and robust support. Additionally, the OpenEDU distribution of Drupal has an
accessibility checker built in that can help to ensure that concerns can be
identified and addressed in real-time, and even before going live.

Security

Because of the many departments
involved and the very high number of users, it is natural for institutions of
higher education to be very concerned about security. While WordPress does
offer in its core offering, a large number of security protocols, users have
the added responsibility of managing the security threats of all the plugins
they employ for various functionalities. It is well known that the third-party
plugins have made WordPress quite vulnerable in the past and threats to its
security continue to emerge regularly; as a target WordPress is especially
attractive due to its huge popularity and simple structure. According to https://www.forbes.com,
an Imperva report has revealed that 98% of the vulnerabilities of WordPress
relate to plugins. The fact that many government organizations, where security
is vital, use Drupal will also serve to reassure users of Drupal’s security.

Custom
Content Support

Various types of custom content
such as events, profiles, and news are a frequent requirement of many higher
education institutions. The ability of WordPress to create custom content types
is undeniable; however, the content structuring tools provided by Drupal are
far more flexible and powerful and have the added advantage of not requiring
any coding. Further, Drupal makes available exceptionally capable tools for
creating and managing custom content while its strong taxonomy/tagging system
permits content editors to relate content and make them discoverable with the
search function. With the help of these powerful tools, content managers on
Drupal can improve the user experience significantly and assist in easy
discoverability of content. An outstanding feature of Drupal is that it
supports the personalization of websites that is very important for
institutions seeking to deepen their existing relationship with users.

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The ability to personalize
websites allows higher education institutions to offer different user
interfaces to different types of users or personas by assisting the site to
learn about user preferences regarding the content they want to see.
Personalization of user experience is a very effective method for balancing a
large number of requirements of various types of users and deepening the
user-relationship.

Scalability

Multisite capabilities of
WordPress are extremely limited which means that customers can end up
struggling to administer large WordPress sites. WordPress Multisite suffers
from the lack of flexibility that permits institutions to customize and style
each website while ensuring permissions, critical governance, and workflow
capabilities. You can use a tool like Acquia to effectively manage hundreds of
sites on the Drupal CMS platform for operations that are truly on a global
scale.

Multilingual
Functionality

Institutions of higher education
are attended often by a large number of international students. The ability of
an institution to present its website in multiple languages can be a critical
differentiator for many students and their parents attempting to find out the
best possible education institutes to apply for admission since they can
evaluate the merits of the institution in their native language. While
WordPress does offer multilingual content capability, there is no doubt that
Drupal 8 offers far more flexibility and greater depth in multilingual language
handling competence with its more advanced in-built capabilities.

Conclusion

While the higher initial
investment requirement for Drupal may deter some educational institutions, with
its scaling up, it is well worth it given that you will perhaps need to spend
more on upgrading WordPress. The enhanced capability of Drupal in terms of
security, personalization, scalability, as well as compatibility with digital
technologies, both currently in force and of the future, make it undeniably a
more attractive choice.

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