Drupal is an open source content management system that can be used to develop a wide variety of dynamic websites from personal or corporate websites, community portals to complex web applications. Available under the GNU Public License, this system supports a wide range of operating systems like BSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows and Mac OSX etc.

Drupal is based on an extensible and modular architecture i.e. various plug-in modules and components can be easily integrated with it thereby enhancing its basic functionality. It is a feature rich application that includes a host of built-in features such as:

• Browser Based Interfaces: It provides browser based admin interfaces that help to manage the website effectively as well as publish and organize content appearing on the web pages.
• Themes: It has a library of template themes that further enable the layout of the website to be customized as per client preferences.
• Extensions: It offer a wide variety of extensions that can be integrated with the basic Drupal setup in order to provide enhanced and advanced functionalities such as discussion forums, blogs, shopping carts, podcasting, photo galleries etc.
• Multiple Sites: The default Drupal installation enables multiple sites to be run from a single installation.
• Discussion Forum: Drupal also consists of "Discussion Forum Module" that enables users to enter their comments pertaining to any content item appearing on the website and carry on a discussion on the same with other users.
• News Aggregator: It provides a built in News Aggregator that can be utilized to gather news/articles from other sites such as blogs etc.
• Multi-lingual: The best part of Drupal is that it provides support for multiple languages and as a result, multilingual websites can be easily created.
• Reporting: The in-built reporting module in Drupal provides administrators with detailed reports on site performance, event logs etc.
• User Profile: Drupal facilitates registered users of a website to create and share their profiles with others.
• Content Linking: It also provides content linking facility and as result multiple content items/articles can be linked to form an online book. This feature can also be used to create FAQs, manuals etc.
• Contact Module: Through the contact module available in Drupal users can send messages to each other through the website.

At Software Service, we also posses the skill set and expertise required to develop Drupal based web applications. Keeping Drupal as a base, we develop custom modules that can be integrated with it in order to provide customized solutions to individual clients. The services that we offer include:

Static site conversion:We offer our services to update static websites to Drupal thereby easing the process for users to upload and publish content appearing on the website.

Drupal installation:We assist our clients in setting up the basic Drupal setup on their servers.

Custom Drupal Templates:We also offer to customize Drupal templates as per the client requirements. We keep in mind the Drupal specifications while customizing the templates.

Custom Extensions: Having years of experience in this industry, we have the potential to customize and develop a wide array of extensions, as per client's needs. This can further enhance and extend the basic functionality of Drupal. All extensions are customized as per the Drupal standards. In case the client requirements are not met with the available extensions, then we prefer to develop Drupal extensions from the grounds up. The extensions can be integrated with the basic Drupal setup.

Integration with third-party applications:We offer to integrate Drupal with other third-party applications and tools such as SAP, Sage and SugarCRM, phpBB, vBulletin etc.

Solutions

Some of the solutions that we have developed using Drupal include the following:

Gaming Websites: We have developed flash based gaming websites for clients that automate the process of uploading games to the website. This solution enabled administrators to categorize, organize and upload games. The performance of the website in terms of most popular games, top players etc can be monitored through the reporting module. The multilingual features of Drupal have been used to make the solutions compatible for various languages. Interactivity was built into the solution by integrating the discussion forums and newsletter subscription modules available with Drupal.

Online TV Guide: In this solution, we developed an online TV guide for our client. With the help of Drupal CMS the client could create channel categories and upload programmer guides for each channel.

Now in order to avoid a manual entry of the program schedule, we made use of XML feeds. All program data was stored in XML files, and used to populate the program schedule for each channel. The front-end of the application enabled surfers to browse and view the program schedules. Various components such as opinion polls, newsletter subscriptions etc were built into the solution.

Classifieds: Our Drupal classifieds solution enabled our client to easily administer and manage a classified ads portal. In this solution, the administrator was provided with the facility to create categories based on which classifieds could be posted by users. In addition to this, features like 'bookmark this classified', 'print classified' etc were built into the solution.

The "CAPTCHA" functionality was integrated with the solution in order to know whether the registration has been done by a human or by automated software. This helps in detecting and stopping automated spamming systems.

Corporate Websites:We have also designed and developed dynamic websites for several corporates. The websites offer them with a mechanism to easily share information about their services and products.

For more about our projects, click here