Is Drupal the Best Platform for Higher Education Websites?

Managing a university’s entire web presence, website content, and website compliance with standards and accessibility across an entire campus is a monumental job. Drupal is used by 7 out of 10 top universities and educational institutions around the world. That makes a convincing argument for rating Drupal as the best platform for higher education websites.

Check Out Which Higher Education Institutions Use Drupal

Don’t just take it from me. This list of Drupal’s university users speaks for itself. And it’s barely scratching the surface.

  • Oxford University
  • Harvard University
  • MIT
  • Stanford University
  • Duke University
  • Karlstad University
  • UCLA
  • University of Arizona
  • Penn State
  • University of British Columbia
  • University of Toronto

I could go on for days. Check out others here.

What Are the Main Reasons Drupal is Popular in Universities?

How much time have you got?

Drupal is hugely efficient in time and cost. It provides a scalable and flexible platform capable of handling very large amounts of content and hundreds of individual contributors. It can be configured to meet the needs of entire institutions and also individual departments simultaneously, making it easier for schools and departments to customize websites to their specific area while operating under the main “umbrella”.

  1. Protecting students’ and faculty’s personal information, communications and academic records is of utmost importance. Websites created using Drupal are pretty much the toughest to hack. That’s why Drupal is relied on by so many higher education institutions and also government departments, even the White House.
  2. Multi-site functionality. Universities and colleges don’t have single-purpose websites. They have many sites, departments, schools, colleges, intranets, communications systems, and much more. Drupal can handle multiple sites and their tasks while letting individual departments have full control. That can add up to big savings in the IT department.
  3. Easy content creation and design templates. Drupal 8‘s friendly UI enables any administrators, even non-experts in web development, to design pages, upload content and manage it. Many design templates are available that are pretty much effortless to use and ensure consistency across an entire institution.
  4. User access control. Websites for higher education institutions require different access rights for a range of users (professors, students, site visitors, etc). Drupal provides modules for managing access and sharing content quickly across multiple sites and portals.
  5. Reusable content. After creating content, Drupal makes reusing it and circulating it through departments, intranets and sub-sites a breeze. Because Drupal is open source, there are many free, simple modules available for enabling this.
  6. Responsive mobile access. Students, and indeed staff, are using smartphones and tablets more than PCs to use college websites for information, administration and communication. Drupal 8’s “mobile first” approach ensures websites always look great and function seamlessly on mobile devices.
  7. Multilingual capability. Drupal 8 can operate in more than 110 languages, allowing a higher education institution to cater for global needs. Drupal’s translation module is outstanding.
  8. Drupal’s powerful collaboration features support internal academic and research teams. Faculty members and students can easily access manuals, handbooks, procedural documents and other content for their research.
  9. Much more, including that Drupal makes social media campaigns much easier and there are also great workflow modules available.

Drupal has the functionality, flexibility, scalability, security and responsive web design capability to claim its rightful place as the foremost platform for developing higher education websites.

Comments

sprite’s picture

Goodness only knows what is "best".

Drupal is a robust CMS that is used by many prestigious universities.

However, I would recommend that you stick with Drupal 7, not Drupal 8, for any kind of production websites because there are too many Drupal 8 contributed modules that remain unfinished and not ready for production websites.

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

Sachin Gupta’s picture

To some extent if we understand the features of the drupal. Of course, a no technical person can't work beyond this. A user will have to rely on the Skilled Website Developer to make any correction or to upload something on the website. but this is also true, once it get developed, no one can harm the safety of this website.

adpo’s picture

Finalsite has his own cms "designed" for schools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EXvQxKn8MY

I think teachers will be looking for a better user experience in near future. This is a good example.

rwhitmore’s picture

Drupal is a great platform for HE institutions, especially in the UK! We're keeping a track of who is currently using it if anyone's interested in finding out which UK universities use it and how: Which UK Universities Use Drupal.

adpo’s picture

I really like the websites, however most of them were build in 2016. What are the current trends?

We need a list of top features for HE websites in 2018/19 .

kbos2hm’s picture

https://www.drupal.com/showcases

If you select high ed it show's most of the University's Off. 

There is also a case study worth reading. 

http://www.ox.ac.uk/

https://www.surrey.ac.uk/

Oxford is still there and others great to see Drupal having a good purpose. 

nadine-alladine’s picture

Drupal’s benefits for higher education websites

  • A site for every department? Easy!

Universities often have plenty of departments and branches. Drupal’s multisite feature makes it possible to have as many sites as you wish on the same Drupal installation. This saves time and costs on site development and administration, while giving self-sufficiency and autonomy to every unit. Content can be easily shared between multiple sites. In addition, universities appreciate intranet solutions, which are easy to implement with Drupal.

  • Flexible permissions

Professors, students, alumni, administrators, visitors, and many others university website users need to have different levels of access to avoid  total chaos. Luckily, Drupal offers a very flexible system of roles, letting you create user roles and assign permissions to them. They will cover even the smallest detail of working with the site.

  • Multiple languages

With international students and branches in different countries, universities take full advantage of Drupal’s powerful multilingual features. These features are especially impressive in Drupal 8, with 4 multilingual modules in core to translate everything — from interface to content. It offers a great choice of over a hundred languages to install on websites. Some awesome volunteer work has been done to make Drupal’s interface available in each of these languages.

  • Workflow management 

Drupal has awesome Workflow modules that make content publication and other processes easy to manage in detail.

  • Easy content creation and editing 

Drupal offers handy ways to create and edit content, which are available to people with no technical background. Drupal 8 has gone a step further in content editing features by introducing on-the-fly editing, better image management, media handling, and much more.

  • Multiple categories

Universities often need to categorize content in various ways to make a website handy to use, and Drupal’s taxonomy features are great for that.

  • Great display on mobile phones

Many students or potential students, as well as staff, browse university websites from a mobile phone. Drupal will make sites look good on any devices. This is especially true for the latest version, Drupal 8, which it has a mobile-first approach. All base themes are responsive out-of-box, and there are modules in the core that allow you to make any theme perfectly responsive.

  • Ability to extend

Higher education establishments grow quickly, and their Drupal sites can easily follow them in this growth due to Drupal’s scalability.

  • Information security

University websites usually store sensitive information. Luckily, Drupal is one of the toughest nuts for hackers to crack when it comes to website safety. This is due to regular security updates, a watchful community, strict checks for contributed modules, and more.

  • Community support

Universities love Drupal, and the Drupal community loves university website just as much, offering support groups, as well as multiple free modules and distributions.

See more details together with website examples here

AmyIness’s picture

Drupal is perhaps not the best or the largest platform, but it is constantly growing, attracting new users. Although in my experience it is worth a try, because with the right amount of time inserted, you can achieve the same as on any platform

Niyi1’s picture

Drupal is gradually gaining popularity among websites users and owners, thanks to the security and trust it has garnered, although WordPress is doing great too but Drupal is fast developing and competing.

vijaykumardrupal’s picture

Because of the features mentioned below, universities prefer Drupal for their websites:

Quick Edits(Drupal is a good manager)
Content and user access control
Improving loading speed.
Security.
Community support
Mobile friendly
20,000 and more themes.
Multi-site approach
Language support
Easier for announcements/cases
Multisite 
Cost effective and licensing