Developing Mobile Apps With Drupal Is Easy and Effective

Developing Mobile Apps With Drupal Is Easy and Effective

by Priyesh Kumar

Mobile applications are becoming very critical for all brands that are willing to offer their users with more interactive information and easy accessibility while on the go. With all business applications becoming web enabled in the past few years, it's time to become tablet and Smartphone enabled in the next. So, all organizations irrespective of their size and industry are trying to become accessible via mobile devices in order to survive and expand into the emerging future. Since Drupal is flexible, free and a powerful content management system, it allows the users to easily manage, publish and organize a wide variety of content on the website and keep the users well informed in just a click of the button.

Using Drupal to create mobile applications

Drupal can enable a company to create powerful websites and it is a great means to create everything from smaller blogs to even the largest business websites. Since mobile applications need to meet the demands for content, it is important to identify the best way to deliver content on the mobile device and at times it can be a tough decision. Built with Drupal, building mobile apps has become easier and less confusing.

Discussing some mobile applications for Drupal websites

DrupalGap

It is an open source mobile application development kit that is used for Drupal sites and it uses Drupal, PhoneGap, jDrupal, jquerymobile. With this application development kit, the developers can easily create and customize multi-platform mobile applications that communicate with their websites. Such applications are easily installable on Android and iOS mobile devices and once they are installed the mobile application can easily interface with a DrupalGap enabled site. Creating a mobile compatible Drupal site can be attained in two different ways. One involves the method of using it as a backend datastore for a native application and the other is more of a traditional web app with a mobile theme. The greatest advantage that the native application offers is the ability to use the features that are inherent to the mobile OS. Such native apps can be easily configured to cache data locally so that even when the device is out of range the applications still work effectively.

Creating a native mobile application offers two different things - access to native functionality and distribution through mobile appstores.

Here are some features that users can get with a native app

• Subscriptions through the appstore, Google Play and etc.
• Easy access to camera for video and images
• Native map functionality
• Access to the file system of the device for caching
• Image filters and background location awareness
• Access to accelerometer, compass, map, gyroscope.

The Distinct advantages of using a Drupal mobile web application are

Developed administrator controls: This offers an authority to set up a new account and administer it completely by you.

Dynamic designs: This carries some of the most unique and interesting themes and templates that are easy to use.

Multi featured with excellent option to create content: The user can add different modules like videos, blogs, podcasts, polls, revision control in their blogs with Drupal CMS.

Easy management- It is easy to manage and the user can easily categorize the posts, create custom lists and much more to organize their website or blog.