First Drupal Contact

Hello, I am Jlopezg88 and I will tell you what my first contact with Drupal and git was. We will start with Drupal which seems more interesting and we will end up with git.
Firstly I want to tell you that a week ago I did not know that Drupal was accurate, I knew it was a CMS such as Wordpress or Joomla but with the peculiarity that it has a reputation for being very difficult to learn having a very high learning curve.

Of course, when I saw this I was very shocked and I thought "This looks like it's very difficult" but after documenting myself on the net I realized that it is a very up-and-coming CMS that has an immense and very active community In the network and also has extensive documentation that makes it lighter and easier to manage. It also has an immensity of modules (Plugins in Wordpress) that can improve the functionality, the navigation in the backend and offer diverse solutions among many others. Another thing that has caught my attention is that each module usually brings its own configuration sections that must be configured to be fully functional, this makes it highly malleable and flexible, but also entails that it can be a little cumbersome, as well That there are modules that depend on others and may be more difficult for users who are not developers or are not familiar with the CMS itself.
One of the best advantages that I think Drupal has in my opinion is that you can create all the roles you want with their respective restrictions and this is less headache for the site administrator to be able to create a specific role for each type of user .
To end with Drupal just say that the current version is 8.2.5 but as it grows so fast it may be outdated very soon. Below I will list what are the 7 strong points that Drupal has:

1. Flexibility.
If you have worked with different CMS you will know that customizing a CMS may seem easy, but many times it is not. Sometimes a client asks for a special functionality that makes one come to a certain point where it is no longer their programming ability, but the same CMS is not meant for that. With Drupal you spend much less than with other CMS.

That's not all. Drupal has an external module called Views that is wonderful. It allows to create pages in any format by automatically constructing queries to the Database. How? For example, show me all the content of the shoe type created between May 15, 2012 and May 17, 2013, which has a field: color - Blue, another: Brand - Stick, and has been published in offers. This query to the Database is a pain to do it manually, and if you have to build many, even more. Views builds them for us automatically and takes the results in a list in the format you ask: summary, complete content, by fields, etc. All this with their different permissions per user, where an administrator can see the edit link of each shoe, but a normal user of the store does not.

2. It is SEO friendly.
A very important detail in our sector is how easy it is to position a website in search engines, and if you really can customize the whole positioning approach of a website. With Drupal it is possible.

To show an example we can speak, among others, Pathauto, another external module that allows us to build our own URL's structure. This creates a very positive impact on our web positioning. There are a lot of modules that help us to the SEO of our page.

3. Reliability.
Why do I say this? Because there are many websites around the world that give us the reason, such as: the White House website, MTV UK, France24.com, the Louvre museum, The Economist, etc. If these organizations entrust their websites to Drupal it is because it is a reliable, secure and customizable CMS. Last year the use of Drupal grew 20%, and now it already exceeds one million web sites.

4. It is safe.
Many software vendors always come up with an argument against open source systems. Everyone can scan the code for vulnerabilities. That is true, but Drupal has made this aspect one of its strengths, and has formed a team of professionals who are only dedicated to search and realize security patches in an autonomous way. For this reason, among others, we rely on Drupal for its security. In addition we still do not know any Drupal hacked website.

5. Very active community.
Why is this point important? At least one million people work to make Drupal CMS ever better and these same people are available to help at any time via IRC in different channels of the community, in forums or with payment services. Therefore, it is easy to find good developers, good agencies and consultancies and you are free to work with any of them. This is one of the great advantages of free and open source software.

We also want to highlight that there are over 20,000 modules that extend Drupal functionality that are free and that there are many distributions that facilitate the development from scratch to different types of website such as e-commerce, social networks, corporate websites, etc.

6. Innovative.
The Drupal community is innovative and quickly adapts new ideas such as advanced search for concepts or tags, the Mollom anti-spam mechanism, which is not intrusive to the user, editing content by clicking on the text without having to enter the environment Administrative, adapting the PHP Symfony2 development framework, among other recent developments contributed to the community.

7. It is open source (free).
You do not have to pay licenses of any kind. Anyone can download Drupal, install it and run it on your computer, test server or anywhere, Windows, Linux or Mac, and you can choose thousands of different companies that use it and design for and by Drupal.

Now we go with git, it is a local and remote repository manager tool that is composed by the master branch which contains 3 trees so to speak that are the working directory which is where we have the local files, the index that is The intermediate zone where we have the changes made in the local files and finally we have the head that is where the changes made are made effective.
The good thing about git is that you can undo your changes. You can create all the branches you create necessary for your project and, if necessary, join them together or with the master branch. The truth seems to me a very useful tool for developers that I had heard a lot about, but so far I have not gotten into looking for information and it seems to me an essential tool.
Well after this paragraph and summarizing I want to conclude that Drupal has surprised and fascinated me, it is the most powerful and highly configurable CMS there is today, which I recommend to be used in websites. Also add that git I think is a fundamental and mandatory tool for developers working with version control, which will make life easier.

I hope you liked the article.

Greetings,

Jlopezg88