Why We Chose Drupal

Back in late 2009 when we decided to rebuild our SubHub platform, we knew several things:

• It had to be based on open source. It’s not possible for a start-up to build and grow a proprietary platform fast enough to keep up with the continually changing pace of market demands and business opportunities. Even the largest companies have trouble innovating as fast as an active and motivated open source community.
• It had to be massively scalable. We needed to enable many thousands of people to self-provision their own websites on our platform. And those many thousands of websites might each have thousands of users of their own.
• It had to possess professional-grade content management capabilities. Even if our target audience were non-technical, the CMS solution had to be capable of supporting any use case -- and our customers can be very imaginative.
• It needed to support e-commerce, so we could enable our customers to charge for membership and make money in numerous other ways.

Drupal fit the bill.

We considered alternatives. Ruby on Rails had great potential, but we would have had to start lower down the food chain and build more of the CMS and e-commerce capabilities ourselves. WordPress was proven, but its origins as a blogging solution meant it wasn’t as robust for CMS as Drupal -- and its architecture of plug-ins meant that things might break on us in unexpected ways.

We caught Drupal just at the right time, as Drupal 7 was reaching the later stages of development. This offered us a great opportunity to launch a cutting-edge content monetization platform. Indeed, when we launched in beta in November 2010, while Drupal 7 itself was still in beta, we were among the first to go live with a major Drupal 7 implementation.

If we needed any further convincing, DrupalCon Chicago did the trick. We spent a week there in March with 3,000 Drupalistas packed top to bottom into one of the city’s biggest hotels. Seeing first-hand the dedication and enthusiasm of the Drupal community told us clearly that we had made the right choice.

Now that we’ve launched our full-blown commercial platform, we’re more confident than ever about our decision. Drupal has provided a powerful underpinning for a simple and elegant end user solution.
There are still many features to add, but our new app market and open API will make that easier, enabling anyone in the Drupal community to contribute. More on that in my next post.

Drupal is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert.