What are the best practices for customizing and extending Umbraco and Drupal?

Customizing and extending Umbraco and Drupal can enhance the functionality and design of your website. Here are some best practices for each platform: Structured Content: Define content types for consistency. Responsive Design: Choose responsive themes/templates. Modules & Extensions: Be selective for efficiency. Security Updates: Regularly update for safety. Caching: Optimize site performance. SEO: Enhance discoverability. Documentation: Maintain detailed records. Testing: Ensure smooth functionality. Following these practices ensures a well-maintained website.

When customizing Umbraco, focus on creating custom content types, setting up workflows that match your team's way of working, and connecting with other tools you use.

"Best practices for customizing and extending Umbraco and Drupal involve leveraging their built-in features, using proper coding standards, and following community guidelines." For Umbraco, use custom document types and templates, and implement C# code for advanced functionality while adhering to Umbraco's API guidelines. For Drupal, create custom modules and themes using Drupal's APIs and hook system, and follow Drupal’s coding standards to ensure compatibility and maintainability. Regularly consult documentation and community resources to stay updated with best practices.

Umbraco can be customised almost infinitely – that's the beauty and the power. When you install it, it is a blank application that can be tailored to your specific needs – although most agencies will have some kind of default starter kit to get you up and running a bit quicker! You can configure the backoffice however you like. Aside from the standard out-of-the-box DataTypes (rich text editors, textboxes, file pickers, etc.), you can build custom DataTypes that can connect to external data sources, allowing editors to include this data into their pages with no technical knowledge. Want to pull in a list of users from your CRM so you can pick an author for a page? Use a custom DataType!

- Customise the appearance and layout of your Drupal site by developing custom themes using HTML, CSS, and Drupal's theme layer. - Extend Drupal's functionality by developing custom modules to add new features or enhance existing ones. Follow Drupal's coding standards and best practices for module development. - define custom content types and fields to structure your site's content according to your specific requirements, providing a tailored content management experience.

For Drupal, you can make new features with custom modules, tweak how your site looks, and adapt content types to fit what you need. These simple tweaks help make your website work just right for you.

It is recommended that you avoid customizing any pre-built areas of a CMS. However, Drupal allows for customization at various levels, from themes to modules. You can have your designs converted into Drupal themes by customizing an existing theme template.

There are a range of options for extending Umbraco. Numerous third-party packages can be installed from the Umbraco Marketplace. The beauty of the Umbraco community is its collaboration and friendliness. Instead of having hundreds of packages that do basically the same thing and flooding the store, developers are more likely to collaborate on a smaller number of higher-quality packages. You can also build your own if you need a specific extension or integration for a client or have a unique internal business requirement. You would need or know a developer to undertake these, but these customisations are what make Umbraco so powerful.

The Drupal Community offers many pre-built extensions that can be used to address various website-related tasks. However, if you come across a requirement that is not covered by any of these extensions, you can create your own by building a module that adheres to Drupal Standards.

Umbraco is user-friendly and flexible, ideal for smaller projects. Drupal is powerful and scalable, better suited for larger, complex websites.

Ultimately, the best choice between Umbraco and Drupal depends on your specific project requirements, technical expertise, and long-term goals. If you prioritise ease of use and flexibility, Umbraco may be the better option. However, if you require extensive features, scalability, and a large ecosystem of extensions, Drupal may be more suitable.

Drupal is open-source and heavily backed by a large Community. It is based on the open-source programming language PHP. This platform is Developer friendly and can handle any level of complex requirements.

One critical best practice to be followed while we handle any CMS is to try to extend the out-of-the-box modules and not try to hack them due to long-term benefits.

Following best practices when extending Umbraco is crucial to ensuring your site remains performant and easy to maintain in the future. Also, when it comes to upgrade time, if you have customised Umbraco far beyond what would be considered best practice, you are in danger! So, following best practices is critical. If you change your development team in the future, they should be able to come in and relatively quickly get up to speed and understand the Umbraco setup and codebase. They can only do this if best practices have been followed. Otherwise, you are going to be paying a ton of money for them to just understand what is going on before you have even got to any site improvements or new features!

Taking the time to learn how to customise and extend Umbraco properly, either by undertaking official Umbraco training or using a Platinum Partner, ensures you are not setting yourself up for failure. Theoretically, any developer can download and install Umbraco and get it up and running. However, to do this properly and ensure your site is easy to maintain, avoiding a spaghetti code situation and a poorly performing backoffice or, worse, front-end, requires a specialist with the right experience. It's worth your time to find a partner with extensive experience – it will save you time and money in the long run!