Often new Drupal users think that their Drupal system is their actual operating system, unfortunately, this couldn’t be furthur from the truth. In today’s post we’re going to look at Drupal and see how it differs from other CMS.
What is a CMS?
A CMS or content management system is the platform in which you can add content, publish new content and conenct withy our readers. There are many different systems and some of them offer very specific uses that other websites or CMS can’t really offer. Take WordPress for example a large portion of the websites on the web are using WordPress for their ecommerce store.
Types of CMS
- HTML – Old School web development always uses HTML. Most of the older web is based on HTML and it still works fairly well.
- Javascript – Anything fancy usually involves javascript. This is the like flash player of the Internet and offers multifunctional design and UX. It’s much slower though.
- WordPress – This is the go-to system for most people and bloggers. It’s easy to use, reliable and has a huge development community.
- Joomla – This is another great way to connect with people who are trying to make a blog and add content onto it.
- Drupal – This is what we’re discussing today.
The actual webhosting that you use doesn’t really affect the kind of CMS you’re utilizing. The reality of the matter is that you’ll need to use a quality web host and deciding on which one works for you is extremely important.
Let’s look at some of the kinds of webhosting you can use for your Drupal website.
Drupal Supported Web Hosting 
- VPS – VPS hosting is the same as any other CMS. Drupal based servers are both easy to configure and also extremely reliable and they use much less resources then others.
- Shared Hosting – This is the process of sharing your web resources with a host of other websites to provide the best quality access around.
- Dedicated – Dedicated hosting providers hosting that is 100% yours and won’t be shared with anyone else.
These are just a few of the different kinds of web hosting that can support Drupal. For most web hosts you can simply configure cPanel to install Drupal instead of whatever the default CMS is.
Principles of Configuration Management
At this point, there is perhaps no better introduction to Drupal 8’s new configuration system than Alex Pott’s two-part article, “Principles of Configuration Management”:
http://chapterthree.com//blog/principles-configuration-management-part-one
http://chapterthree.com//blog/principles-configuration-management-part-two
If you want to learn more about CMI, this is the place to start.
Introducing the Drupal 8 Configuration System
If you are looking for video/persentation about the basic principles of the new Drupal 8 configuration system, check out Matthew Tift’s talk from DrupalCon Austin, “Introducing the Drupal 8 Configuration System”:
https://austin2014.drupal.org/session/introducing-drupal-8-configuration…
Configuration translation basics
Here is another great post by Gábor Hojtsy, this time about configuration translation basics. He does a great job explaining why the Drupal 8 configuration system is so helpful for multilingual sites. Check it out!
http://hojtsy.hu/blog/2014-may-19/drupal-8-multilingual-tidbits-15-configuration-translation-basics