Drupal

Drupal is a modular content management framework, content management system and blogging engine which was originally written by Dries Buytaert as a bulletin board system. Today, it is used by many high-traffic websites, including The Onion, Spread Firefox (CivicSpace, see below), Ourmedia, KernelTrap, and the Defective by Design campaign. Drupal is written in PHP. As of June 1st, 2006, the current version is 4.7.2.

Meaning of Drupal

Drupal is the English spelling for the Dutch word 'druppel' which means 'drop' (as in, 'a drop of water'). The name was taken from the Drop.org website (now defunct), whose code slowly evolved into Drupal. Dries actually wanted to call the site 'dorp' (Dutch for 'village', referring to its community aspects), but made a typo when checking the domain name and thought it sounded better. The project was started in 2000.

Content Management System

Drupal has a basic layer, or core, which supports pluggable modules that enable additional behaviors. The modules available for Drupal provide a wide assortment of features, including e-commerce systems such as the Amazon Items module, workflow, photo galleries, mailing list management, and CVS integration. Drupal's taxonomy/classification module is especially interesting, in that it allows any content to be classified with a flexible tagging system. Drupal achieves clean integration between the core and the modules via a system of hooks, or callbacks, to allow modules to insert functionality into Drupal's path of execution. Drupal core provides protection against many usual security problems, like SQL injection.

Drupal is considered somewhat more difficult to install and configure initially than some other content management systems such as Mambo or than basic blogging tools such as WordPress or Movable Type, but it is considered easier to install than others, such as Plone (which offers more advanced features). Drupal's standard visual themes have also been criticized as less attractive and polished than the visual theming available with some other CMS packages (notably Mambo and Plone). However, its modular design and well-documented, clean codebase makes it easier for individuals with knowledge of PHP to custom-code their own additional features, and many feel that Drupal's focus on user communities also sets it apart from its competition. Some of the more specialized roles that Drupal has filled include company intranets, online classrooms, art communities and project management. It has been used for applications including the following:

The Ann Arbor District Library used Drupal in building an award-winning website that includes a number of custom-added features, such as enabling individual library patrons to create their own personalized card catalogs.
A number of political campaigns, such as the Jack Carter for Senate campaign in Nevada, have created Drupal-based campaign websites.
The availability of CiviCRM, a contact relationship management system that integrates with Drupal, has made it an attractive platform for nonprofit organizations such as Greenpeace UK. ^*
Drupal has also been used to create hyperlocal citizen journalism websites in towns such as Bluffton, South Carolina and Watertown, Massachusetts. [http://h2otown.info

Distributions

Drupal was the basis for DeanSpace, a content management system used to power many independent websites supporting the 2004 presidential campaign of Howard Dean. After the Dean campaign ended, the DeanSpace project grew into CivicSpace, a Drupal-based "grassroots organizing platform that empowers collective action inside communities and cohesively connects remote groups of supporters." CivicSpace includes CiviCRM and other features useful on websites for nonprofit organizations and political campaigns. ^*

There are several other customized Drupal distributions. Most are simply drupal repackaged with third party modules, but some also include modifications to the core. They include:

DrupalEd - classroom and educational use
DrupalART, aimed at artists and musicians using Drupal.
vbDrupal, Drupal integrated with vBulletin.

Books

Drupal has been discussed in several books.

Notable Drupal websites

Notable websites using Drupal or one of its distributions include:

The Onion, a satire magazine
Spread Firefox, a campaign to increase distribution of the Firefox web browser
Ourmedia, a community media archive
KernelTrap, a computing news website
Defective by Design, a political campaign by the Free Software Foundation
TWiT, a technology podcast network
mariposaHD, a high definition television program distributed over the Internet
The Allerian Empire, a play-by-post collaborative fiction website (using vBDrupal)
Ecademy, a social networking site (modified software)
Planet Boinng, a collaborative weblog
Rant Media, an Internet media outlet (Drupal is used for the community section)

External links

Open source content management systems | PHP programming language | Blog software