Small businesses are key to the well-being of the national and global economy. They hold the responsibility for bringing diversity to the private sector and offer a healthy range of options for the consumers. However- and this is the most important aspect- small businesses give ordinary individuals the ability to control their very own destiny.
Those very same ingredients for success for a small business- ingenuity, creativity, thrift, small teams- often put them at a disadvantage owing to a lack of resources. Thus they tend to be creative in choosing unique tools that help them to achieve success.
When it comes to building a website for small business, the names that mostly comes in front are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. However, the Drupal CMS stands out as one such tool that connects between power and flexibility. This is why it provides every small business with a wealth of digital potential.
It has been quite some time now since the last major update of Drupal had been released. With more than 1700 contributors working towards building the next iteration process, Drupal 8 has come as a real breath of fresh air for the developers. Whether you are a drupal developer or a business looking to build your website in Drupal, these essential features are the one that can catch your eye. So what are the features of this new CMS that small businesses are most likely to get excited about?
Let us look at five of the key Drupal 8 features that will serve you well in maximising your business.
Manage your website content from the privacy of your phone
Any individual who has ever administered a website will know that it is best done while using a laptop or desktop device. Much of the backend functionality is either simply useless or does not have support for mobile platforms. The Drupal 8 Mobile Initiative has been launched as a group effort for making this CMS a great platform for smartphones, tablets, and other similar mobile devices. Not only will your site administration go mobile but the themes will also become responsive. Thus, both administrators and mobile visitors of your website will be afforded a better experience.
Travel the world with your website
While multi-lingual functionality is an important support for Drupal 7 CMS, it is not quite at the same level as what we get to see in the latest release. Imagine having to translate your website content to any one of the 110 different support languages. Not only will you be able to translate the contents of a page for a specific language but also build views and be able to determine which of the blocks should be appearing for that language. Translation updates will also automatically get pushed to the site in order to ensure that it has the latest dictionary.
HTML5 makes the grand entry
HTML5 has come to pass as a major improvement over the current XHTML feature that Drupal 7 makes use of. The former represents a major step forward in the manner in which content gets structured and presented on the Web. As explained by many experts, HTML5 is capable of providing a much better user experience on both mobile and desktop devices. It could also lead to a convergence between the mobile web and native applications.
Change view parameters without the help of a developer
A set of defining parameters, views determine such things as what content gets shown on a page, what are the fields to be displayed, the order of their display, etc. Drupal 7 had a Views module that was separate from the core and is dependent on the CT Tools Suite. With the VDC initiative Views have been built into the Drupal 8 Core and is easily available with a fresh install. This translates to a better integration. The latest version of this CMS also promises to make the Views application largely easier, which means that the site administrators can exercise complete control rather than be reliant on a more technical development team.
Less number of modules to allow reduced server loads and faster page loads
Every time a page used to load on a Drupal 7 website, all of its enabled modules would load up as well with the CMS itself determining which ones would implement a required hook. There is no necessity for every module to feature on each page which leads to a longer load time while the user peruses the site. Owing to an overall transition to the Symfony framework, this latest CMS version loads only the modules that a page needs and no more than that. This translates to a faster page load for the visitors and the likelihood of a decrease in the amount of required run-time memory to give an overall smooth performance.
Wrapping up,
These are some of the popular changes that small businesses will be able to make the most of while using Drupal 8. If you are still stuck on using the older versions of this CMS migrate to this new version and enjoy the benefits of some really wonderful commercially beneficial features.
Sajan Neupane 
