Driving business growth with open-source Digital Experience Frameworks

We recently introduced the concept of digital experience frameworks as the essential tools for creating and managing digital experiences. That blog post covered the basics of DXF: what’s meant by the term, some different types of DXF, and how to choose the right ones for your needs, supported by a short look into the choices for Agiledrop’s own suite of DXF.

This post will then focus more on the advantages of open-source digital experience frameworks and how they can be utilized to streamline operations and drive growth for your business. 

We’ll discuss the main reasons for opting for open-source DXF rather than custom development or proprietary tools, and take a look at the benefits of using them, both for your products/services as well as for your internal operations. 

How can you drive business growth with open-source digital experience frameworks?

In the experience economy, websites are just one of the numerous channels with which your customers interact with your business. In order to truly drive business growth, you’ll want to take advantage of all available channels where your target audience spends their time (and money!).

It’s true that with custom development, you’ll get all the customizability you desire and won’t be constrained with certain limitations of specific and already established DXF. However, custom development, especially in the multichannel digital landscape, is not only much more costly, but also much much more time consuming than relying on open-source DXF.

Just think of it - while you may achieve more functionality with custom development, the question arises whether the custom code will be completed at a time when this functionality is still relevant. Chances are high that this won’t be the case.

With SaaS solutions for creating digital experiences, the story is a bit different. They are incredibly time- and resource-efficient, but that’s also reflected in the budget. 

For big companies with a reasonable budget, it might make sense to rely on established SaaS providers - but what about small to medium-sized businesses that don’t have the luxury to afford a premium subscription to, say, Salesforce?

Furthermore, while initial development is faster, the SaaS still likely has certain limitations which can’t be dealt with as flexibly as with a digital experience framework. Plus, if you ever decide to migrate from a SaaS to another solution, you’ll have a very hard time getting all your data - it won’t, technically, be yours.

Luckily, there are a lot of really good open-source solutions - this is basically free software, supported and vetted by a community of experts (with frameworks such as WordPress or React, for example, these communities are downright huge). 

There are 2 crucial things to take into account here:

• Vetting by experts guarantees a very high level of security. This is especially true in Angular and Drupal: the former is supported by Google, while the latter is renowned for being the most secure open-source CMS and as such a favorite of governments, nonprofits and similar organizations.
• Wide range of customizable options makes it easier to do personalization well, which contributes to a better customer experience, with higher conversion and lower bounce rates.

All three digital experience frameworks which we utilize at Agiledrop satisfy these two criteria. As the two leading CMS with huge communities backing them, WordPress and Drupal are able to respond efficiently to the ever-changing market demands, both of them introducing sought-after features while allowing for better and better integration with other technologies. 

Both of them can also be used as “headless” or “decoupled” content management systems, relying on a front-end framework such as Angular or React for the presentation of that content.

While both of them offer out-of-the-box support for React, they can function with basically any framework. There have been a few articles recently on using WordPress with Vue, and one of our developers has been working on a project that uses Vue in combination with Drupal. 

Our front-end framework of choice, however, is the TypeScript-based Angular, due to its enterprise capabilities. These especially make it a perfect fit with Drupal, which is also predominantly used for bigger, enterprise platforms. 

Angular is developed and maintained by leading tech company Google, and the TypeScript language by another tech giant, Microsoft. On top of that, the framework’s regular release cycle guarantees constant additions and optimizations to functionality and security. 

All three frameworks provide enough out-of-the-box features, as well as all the plugins, modules and other tools contributed by the community, that you can significantly cut down on costs with them, as you’ll require less custom development to achieve the same functionality. 

What’s more, to cater to the recent explosion of digital channels, they also come with excellent mobile support, as well as the ability to integrate with any kind of channel, allowing your business to leverage all the channels it needs to, from the web to IoT. 

In addition to powering all sorts of digital experiences for your audiences, open-source DXF are also the ideal tools for all of your internal operations, from WebOps to project and resource management. 

WordPress and especially Drupal are perfect for internal platforms where you need good content management capabilities, media handling and well-defined permissions and user roles. 

Frameworks such as Angular or React are then suited towards more specific use cases - at Agiledrop, we recently revamped our resource management dashboards which now utilize Angular, for example. And, as our project managers testify, their day-to-day work has been greatly facilitated thanks to this upgrade!

So, by providing a great experience for both your users and customers, as well as your employees, open-source digital experience frameworks are a cost-effective and future-proof solution for establishing and scaling your digital presence. Leveraging them allows for more innovation and flexibility, enabling you to better tailor your digital experiences to the needs of your audiences.

Conclusion

To sum up, open-source digital experience frameworks such as Drupal, WordPress and Angular can be used to power any kind of digital experience, from products to operations, from web to mobile to physical digital display.

They are by their very nature future-proof enough to guarantee business relevance a few years down the line when new trends emerge, allowing you to scale and grow without having to worry about migrating your entire codebase every few years, or losing any user data. 

This is only enhanced with the frameworks’ commitment to backward compatibility, which will make upgrades between future versions even easier. 

If you’re looking for the right suite of digital experience frameworks for your next project, and proven engineers versed in those frameworks, reach out to us and we’ll craft a team with the perfect skill-set for your needs.