Bentley University Chooses Drupal and Shares Why

The developers at Bentley University had initially been tasked with finding a new platform to drive their website, centering on using an open source based content management system to power more than 70,000 pages.
The team had reviewed multiple options like WordPress or Joomla, but eventually decided on Drupal and its sophisticated range of CMS modules.
This choice also rested on the fact that their team noticed an increasing amount of mobile visitors landing on their website pages.
“Website logs show mobile visitors account for about 10% of the traffic to Bentley’s marketing and admissions websites, but that traffic has grown 127% over the past year,” said Scott Lozier, Senior Web Developer, Bentley University.
Drupal had also specifically been used to improve critical web pages like the undergraduate admissions website section.
The Bentley team decided on the Zen theme (grid layout) with a responsive design for smartphone platforms. Lozier led the optimization task with a specific view to NOT use Drupal in a fractured manner as other Universities were doing.
As a result, the standardized Drupal implementation is more similar to a marketing communications rollout, rather than one typically associated with a University or Academic department.
According to their users, Drupal’s advantage for more complex websites over other open source CMS systems lies in its powerful configuration modules and editing features.
Drupal can run different sites from a single instance of the software and provides a better learning experience, which has more benefits in an academic environment compared to the corporate sector.
Another hallmark has been the use of Drupal to manage nearly 70,000 pages and centralizing them to content areas. The idea is that while the content can be unique, it can be managed dynamically based upon profiling and tagging.