I work for a very large company. We own 30+ newspapers, each with their own New Media departments.

We have a dozen or so Drupal installs active in the company. Two of which are very high profile in the newspaper industry.

Every once in a while, someone in the company asks me “Hey, why did we choose Drupal?’

Here’s a short version of the answer. (Another version can be seen at http://drupal.org/node/34421#comment-65973).

In Spring 2005, I examined the following platforms:

• Absolut
• backEnd
• Drupal
• Exponent
• Geeklog
• Mambo
• Noah
• PhpX
• Quickstart
• Scoop
• Typo3
• Xoops

WordPress wasn’t around yet.

Of these, I really only liked Mambo and Drupal. Two reasons:

- Quality of Code
- Quality of User Community

At the time, it seemed to me that Mambo was better suited to single-author publishing — great for company web sites, but not a community platform.

Drupal, on the other hand, when you really look at it, is an application framework. And it’s well designed for that. It has APIs for creating your own features quickly and easily.

Mambo has developed that as well (as has WordPress), but it wasn’t as clear at the time. Plus, Drupal contributors had already built most of the features I was after.

In general, Drupal, out of the box, offers about 70% of the features we need. The rest are easy to add.

So here’s the rundown of Why Drupal:

- Stable
- Extensible
- Actively Supported
- Free

Drupal lets us get projects out the door very quickly.

Take a look at the new FanaticZone.com, which one developer and an intern built in less than six weeks using Drupal as a framework.