Continuing our look at using this flexible content management system on a local server to develop and test your ideas for a photography website

Last issue, we showed how to build a photography website from scratch using the Drupal content management system (CMS). This approach is an alternative to enlisting the services of a dedicated website-builder platform like SmugMug, Squarespace or Wix (see issue 231).

To recap, websites built using a CMS are more sophisticated than ones consisting of fixed or ‘static’ pages of text, and are essential for displaying images. These are stored in a database and served to users as required; the website’s host CMS accepts requests from a remote computer and instructs the server to send the data.

While using the WordPress CMS will get the job done perfectly well, developing a site in Drupal will appeal to computer-literate folk who have the time - and the inclination - to go behind the curtain of a website’s front-end.

Drupal is an open-source general-purpose CMS, with a large community of contributing developers. It’s popular with governments, non-profit firms and educational institutions. Security is one of its USPs - vital for anyone looking to use their photography website to sell images or prints - and its relative lack of penetration compared with the ubiquitous WordPress makes Drupal less vulnerabe to hackers, who tend to target larger platforms.