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Why Should Enterprises Invest in CMS for the Developer Portals? The Developers’ Secret is Out.

With the ever-changing digital landscape, consumer demands are also increasing. Today, even the most traditional consumers expect a customized experience from the websites they interact with.However, from an enterprise perspective, creating, publishing, and maintaining a complete website with content has always been a time-consuming operation. This issue led to the emergence of a new category of software in the market known as CMS (Content Management Systems).The numbers are astounding when it comes to CMS market share:

  • A content management system is used by more than 78 million websites nowadays. This represents about 58% of all web pages.
  • Almost 900,000 of the top 1 million websites in terms of traffic use a CMS. That is almost 90%.
  • By 2028, it is expected that the CMS market will be worth $25.5 billion.

Why do enterprises use CMS for Developer Portals?

Before delving into the reasons why enterprises should utilize CMS for their developer portals, let’s first define the developer portal.

Developer Portal: A quick overview

Developer portals are considered a platform that gives API teams access to support in the form of information concerning the APIs.In general, a developer portal is a website or section of a website that provides developers with the resources and documentation they need to use a company’s APIs, SDKs, and other developer tools. It provides the necessary technical information for software developers to configure and manage communication between an API and internal and external systems. It aims to generate more output more quickly than it would for a single team of developers without community help.Developer portals typically consist of two components:

  • Functional documentation covers status codes, API guidelines, and fundamental flow diagrams.
  • Technical information: This contains instructions on how to put together resources and sample calls.

Benefits of investing in the developer portal

A well-designed developer portal can help a company attract and retain developers, which can in turn lead to increased adoption and revenue from API usage. It is also important for the developer portal to be up-to-date, accessible, and easy to navigate to ensure the developer experience is positive.Apart from it, the developer portals offer the following benefits to enterprises-

  • A developer portal explains to visitors what your software and APIs offer and the development opportunities available.
  • Guides and documentation are centralized on a developer portal. Additionally, it offers simple methods for developers to contact the API team as well as app galleries that highlight the capabilities of APIs or other technologies.
  • Portals aid other developers in producing things more quickly. The development life cycle finally shortens through the usage of user-friendly discussion forums and an intuitively organized information base.

Using CMS for Developer Portals

Content and APIs are critical components of any website. To explain the business value of your APIs, it is essential for enterprises to curate the documentation they want to include carefully.A developer portal built with a CMS can also include features such as discussion forums, where developers can ask questions and share their experiences, as well as an API playground that allows developers to test API calls without having to write any code. Some CMS platforms also have built-in support for versioning, which can make it easier to keep track of changes to API documentation and other resources over time.

Is CMS valuable for Developer Portal?

If the answer to the below-mentioned questions is yes, enterprises must go for CMS for their developer portal.

  • Is your company’s developer portal an internal directory with links to all of the API documentation?
  • Do you want your users to search your API listings to find and access what they require?
  • Do you want to provide a sandbox, examples of code usage, access keys, and other supporting documentation to your API consumers?
  • Is the goal of your developer portal to make APIs and documentation available to third parties so they may use them to enhance and extend the goods and services you offer?

What CMS should enterprises use for their developer portal?

A CMS for developer portal can help a company create and organize developer-related content, such as tutorials, API reference documentation, and code samples, in an easy way to navigate and search. Some popular CMS options for building developer portals include WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.Today, the market is full of a variety of content management systems, and a lot of well-known enterprises in the market rely on them. One of the reasons why Drupal is a widely sought-after CMS in the current dynamic CMS landscape is that it enables businesses and individuals to organize, present, and alter many sorts of content with little to no technical skills.

What makes Drupal the top choice for a developer portal?

Drupal is a flexible content management system that is based on the LAMP stack. In contrast to other CMSs available on the market, it has a modular architecture that enables the addition and removal of features by installing and uninstalling modules, as well as the customization of the website’s appearance by installing and uninstalling themes.When it comes to the developer portal, it is also important to not only focus on the technological advancements, but also on the other aspects of its ecosystem, such as design, service, and the content form that will be provided to the developers, designers, or API consumers.Drupal has grown to be the platform of choice for many businesses and well-known organizations like Tesla, NASA, the NCAA, and many others, powering more than 1.7 million websites.

The top 7 reasons that make Drupal an excellent CMS for developer portals are

  • In Drupal, a developer is not necessary for every small modification.
  • It is backed by a community of dedicated contributors who look after constant innovation to push its potential in terms of functionality as a CMS and usability for developers, site managers, and users.
  • With a built-in text editor and drag-and-drop page-building tools, it makes life simple for content developers. It has a WYSIWYG editor that makes it simple to format content and make changes to the content in real time.
  • Standard accessibility technologies like semantic HTML5 are well supported by this CMS. To enhance the user experience, Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 allow administrators to control font sizes, color contrasts, jQuery UI’s autocomplete, and modal dialogue boxes.
  • It is mobile-first out of the box. A REST API is available from Drupal to facilitate mobile content editing. The content developer can extract the specified content into a layout element using Drupal’s “Views” feature. Additionally, it can be utilized as a data source and generate XML or JSON content.
  • Drupal can not only be installed in a different language, but it also supports multilingual content publishing workflows.
  • It is a well-protected and secure system. In comparison to other CMSes, it is less vulnerable and has the ability to manage sensitive data safely. A committed team of people manages bug fixes and security updates for Drupal on a regular basis.

A Drupal developer portal can expand in line with your business needs, allowing your team to start creating solutions that best cater to your audience.

Why is Drupal a reliable content management system?

Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is widely used for building websites and applications.It has become a reliable CMS for businesses due to the following important characteristics.

Large Community

The Drupal community is large and actively engaged in the development and evolution of the platform. As of 2021, Drupal has more than 1 million users and developers globally who actively contribute to the project, create add-ons, and build websites using Drupal. The community is also quite active on forums and social media platforms, where members share knowledge and help each other with various aspects of using and developing Drupal.

Dedicated Security Team

Drupal has a dedicated security team that works to ensure the security of the Drupal content management system. The team is responsible for reviewing and patching security vulnerabilities that are discovered in the software, and they also provide guidance and best practices to the Drupal community to help secure their websites. The Drupal Security Team is an official team under the Drupal Association, a non-profit organization that helps promote and support the Drupal project.

Ready to use Plugins

Drupal offers a wide variety of plugins, also known as modules, to extend its functionality. Some popular ready-to-use plugins for Drupal include

  • Views: It allows for the creation and management of lists of content, as well as the ability to display that content in a variety of formats.
  • Pathauto: Automatically generates URL/path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, taxonomy terms, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias.
  • SEO Checklist: Provide checklists for evaluating the website’s SEO performance for better visibility and search engine ranking
  • Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation: Optimizes website’s front-end performance by aggregating CSS and JavaScript files, minifying them, and serving them from a single file
  • WYSIWYG: Enables a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editor for editing content, making it easier for users who are not familiar with HTML to create and format content.
  • Backup and Migrate: This provides a simple and efficient way to back up a Drupal site’s database and restore it or migrate it to another environment.
  • Security Review: The security review module help to check for security vulnerabilities in the drupal site, it also checks for insecure configuration settings.

These are just a few examples of the many plugins available for Drupal. There are many more plugins available for specific purposes such as e-commerce, forums, and forms.

Other Characteristics

  • In addition to using third-party libraries like Composer, PHPUnit, Guzzle, the Zend Feed Component, and Assetic, Drupal adheres to the most recent PHP standards, including PSR-4, namespaces, and characteristics.
  • Semantic versioning is used by Drupal to more effectively express the presence of any bug patches, new features, or modifications.
  • Twig is a flexible, quick, and secure theme engine that is used by Drupal 8 and Drupal 9.
  • The Drupal backend is powered by Symfony 4; a lighter and quicker core provides additional possibilities for modules and themes.

Why did we choose Drupal for Cardium DevPortal?

A CMS makes it easy for developers to find the information they need, and also makes it easier for teams to create and manage that information. It allows developers to customize the experience and add new features, which makes it a good option for developer portals.As described in the article, Drupal’s adaptability and extensibility make it a suitable platform for our CMS. It serves as a perfect platform for meeting the varied needs of developer portals and the numerous third-party systems that they must incorporate.It will be interesting to see what capabilities Drupal adds to strengthen developer portals and enhance digital experiences in the upcoming years.