7 Reasons Why Top Universities Use Drupal

Robust and reliable web platforms have become indispensable to Higher Education institutions. These institutions' academic and administrative functions are managed through such platforms nowadays. In this background, higher education needs a solid and innovative web solution that allows coordination with an infinite third-party application.

Drupal is a popular and powerful open-source Content Management System (CMS) that higher education institutions worldwide have widely adopted. 80% of the top 100 Universities use Drupal. These include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Oxford, Stanford, and the highest ranked universities across the glob.

There are several reasons why Drupal is considered the best CMS for higher education websites. Here are the important seven of them:

Flexibility and Customization

Drupal is a highly customizable CMS Framwork. May Universities have their own Drupal distributions and used Drupal for 100s of websites. Drupal as a CMS framework give the University IT team the power to create the entire University website eco system in Drupal, which makes the maintaince and feature enhancement very easy.

Robust User Management

Drupal has a powerful user management system, and support integrations with Single Sign On systems which is particularly important for higher education websites. Such websites usually have many users with different roles and permissions. Drupal allows administrators to create and manage user accounts, assign roles and permissions, and control access to content. All connected to their central user management system.

Accessibility Compliance

1. 

   Higher education institutions have a legal and social obligation to make their websites accessible to all. Creating a design system and base theme on Drupal make it easy for the universities to ensue accessibility compliance. There are numerous other Drupal modules are available to ensure accessibility compliance.

   Multisite Functionality

   

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   Maintaining 100's of websites is very common among universities. It is a very complex and expensive task to manage 100s of websites. Drupal by default comes with multi-site capability and this enable universities to manage many websites with a single instance of Drupal. Our study shows that there are are 40% of Top 100 Universities manage more than 10 websites in Drupal.

   Security and Stability

   

   Drupal is known for its security and stability, which is particularly important for higher education websites that handle sensitive data such as student records and financial information. Drupal's security team regularly releases security updates and patches, and the platform is built with security best practices in mind.

   Community Support

   

   Drupal has a large and active community of developers, users, and contributors. They constantly work to improve the platform. This means that higher education institutions can benefit from ongoing updates and improvements to the software, and can always find help and support when they need it. Also the higher adoption of Drupal in the education sector open the possibility of collaboration between universities IT teams and create innovative solutions that will benefit everyone.

   Integration with Third-Party Applications

   

   Many higher education institutions use a variety of third-party applications and services, such as student information systems, learning management systems, and social media platforms. Drupal has a robust Application Programming Interface (API) and supports integration with a wide range of third-party applications. This helps the institutions to streamline workflows and improve efficiency.