Standing the Test of Time: 20 Years of Content Management

Choosing the right application framework makes all the difference—between supporting growth and innovation or dealing with retrofitting and rebuilding.

Twenty years ago, we made a strategic bet on Drupal. While other companies have rebuilt their platforms multiple times chasing the latest technology trends, we’ve helped clients create digital experiences that continuously evolve and improve—because we established the right foundation from the start. 

When content management systems were still novel (“it works like a database, but it looks like a website!”), we recognized Drupal’s potential as more than a website builder. It was a platform for sustainable growth. Drupal’s core benefits remain as relevant today as they were two decades ago:

• Enterprise-grade security that protects student data through built-in best practices.
• Platform architecture designed for customization without limitations.
• Sophisticated management tools that work behind the scenes.

For our clients, this translates to lower total cost of ownership and fewer platform migrations. After two decades of building edtech platforms, we’ve learned that the right foundation doesn’t just save money—it creates possibilities you never anticipated.

Security That Meets Education’s Standards

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FERPA compliance isn’t optional. One security vulnerability can result in significant financial penalties and irreparable reputation damage. The data tells a clear story: CVE.org reports that WordPress has nearly 20 times more recorded vulnerabilities than Drupal. For organizations managing student data, that’s the difference between weeks and years of potential exposure risk.

Drupal’s architecture delivers additional security compliance advantages that matter to K-12 organizations:

Granular permissions: Robust role-based access controls limit PII exposure to essential personnel only.

Automatic audit trails: Built-in logging of security events like user creation, deletion, and content changes.

Content versioning: Complete revision history providing transparency for compliance reviews.

These capabilities consistently help our clients meet stringent district adoption requirements—often becoming competitive advantages during the procurement process.

Built for the Growth You Can’t Predict

EdTech success creates complex challenges. You launch a pilot serving a few districts, scale to dozens, then hundreds. Each growth phase brings unexpected requirements: single sign-on integration, advanced analytics, custom security profiles for different user types, multilingual support.

With Drupal, these aren’t roadblocks requiring expensive rebuilds—they’re natural extensions of the platform’s core functionality. Growth creates opportunities, not technical debt.

Consider one of our long-term partnerships: a math curriculum provider who needed their first digital platform for educators. We launched in just a few months, enabling immediate stakeholder feedback. Fast forward 15 years and last month, I deployed the 87th update to that same platform—now serving thousands of districts nationwide.

K-12 platforms aren’t simple websites. They’re complex systems with evolving requirements that you can’t fully anticipate. This client’s sustained growth and ROI would have been impossible without Drupal’s robust capabilities.

When Simple Isn’t Scalable

The COVID-19 Pandemic created urgent needs for supporting remote learning from home. One client initially chose Google Sites for its simplicity—their content team could publish quickly without technical barriers. But limitations soon surfaced:

• No review workflow meant content went live without proper oversight.
• Layout changes required manually editing hundreds of individual pages.
• No way to filter content by grade level or subject area.
• Limited analytics and user engagement data.

We migrated them to Drupal, transforming their entire workflow. They gained structured content management, automated publishing workflows, dynamic content rotation, grade-level filtering, and seamless English-Spanish language switching. The migration solved immediate problems while opening possibilities they’re still discovering today.

Innovation Over Infrastructure

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Nobody gets excited about plumbing, until it breaks. The same is true for any edtech solution today. Like most, you probably didn’t get into this industry looking forward to managing servers, monitoring app performance logs, and debugging content workflow issues. You want to focus on offering a solution that meets the needs of education, not rebuilding infrastructure every few months. Drupal takes care of the essential but unglamorous work of common infrastructure operations so you can invest in innovating and enhancing your solution.

We recently assessed a client whose MVP platform lacked many fundamental capabilities. Their development team had built limited and unreliable tools that demanded constant attention. Every dollar spent fixing backend problems meant less investment in educational innovation.

The choice became clear: continue patching an unstable foundation or rebuild on proven technology. While we helped stabilize their immediate security and performance issues, the reality was stark—their initial platform choice created years of technical debt that limited their ability to serve educators effectively.

Your Technology Should Enable, Not Limit

We’ve spent decades building educator-facing platforms using Drupal as the underlying web application framework. This approach lets our clients focus their investment in custom functionality where they create the most value—developing experiences that help educators and students succeed.

Our decades of experience in building interactive web applications with Drupal means we can anticipate the answers to questions you haven’t even thought to ask yet. Whether you’re scaling from initial prototype or to a major feature launch for back to school, or adding sophisticated features like learning analytics and personalized content delivery, having the right foundation makes growth seamless and more cost effective.

Ready to stop wrestling with your platform and start transforming education? Let’s explore what becomes possible when your technology foundation simply works.