Now that we have a stable and full version online and we are satisfied with the output it’s time to talk what is behind the scenes.

WCM  (Web content management system)
A  WCM (usually called CMS by the OSS) is a software system for managing content that keeps the content apart from the code, providing a powerful tool and giving independency (especially) to non technical people. These days, most of the websites have dynamic content requirements, therefore it is essential to plan upfront the WCM for a website.

The choice of a technology depends always on the timeframe, the project requirements and the in-house knowledge. Hence why, the obvious choice was a WCM in PHP/MySQL. Build one from scratch makes no sense, it’s not worth reinventing the wheel with the powerful and mature tools that are offered today.

Initially we wanted a website only with a public area and we considered Wordpress and Joomla. However, we had a client area and more complex features in the roadmap, so Drupal was the way to go.

Why Drupal was the best bet?
Many people say Wordpress is more for end-users, Joomla for designers and Drupal for developers and I couldn’t agree more. There is a plethora of articles comparing the different WCM’s like this http://paulkortman.com/2011/01/26/wordpress-vs-drupal-vs-joomla-vs-expre... or this http://onestoryeveryday.com/wordpress-vs-drupal-vs-joomla-essential-read...

Personally, I think Drupal has a few key strengths:

- Great documentation and a large community;
- Superior architecture;
- SEO Friendly;
- Any kind of user permissions and user groups;
- Flexibility, it’s easy to integrate with other solutions, expand functionalities and add features due the clear, high quality code and API;
- Powerful templating system.

The main issue is the huge startup curve, be prepared. It’s not easy at the beginning especially to non developers types, but with commitment is a rewarding effort. You can easily build a simple WCM, e-commerce or a large membership and community website with high traffic. Drupal handles it!

Responsive framework
This was a big challenge as Sérgio explained in the previous blog post.
We choose cssgrid as the engine to our responsive layout and integrated it in our custom Drupal theme. The tune up can be painful, especially if the design is not well planned and you can reach a dead end easily, so think about it before hand when you are planning a new website.

Client restricted area
The goal here for now was to provide to our clients an easily channel to access and manage confidential data, mainly documents, so a custom Drupal module was developed to fit the bill.

In future, we plan to add a couple more features like support ticketing system, client chat, etc.

For now this is our formula, but never a dogma.

"To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
Winston Churchill