Drupal

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.

Drupal is a content management platform that allows users to easily publish, manage, and organize a wide variety of content on a website. It is used for community web portals, discussion sites, corporate web sites, intranet applications and many other sites. Drupal is easy to extend by plugging in freely available modules.

Homepage: drupal.org

Drupal is a free and open-source content management framework (CMF) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License.It is used as a back-end system for at least 2.1% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk.It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.

The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to content management systems. These include user account registration and maintenance, menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration. The Drupal core installation can be used as a brochureware website, a single- or multi-user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for user-generated content.

As of January 2013, there are more than 20,100 free community-contributed addons, known as contributed modules, available to alter and extend Drupal's core capabilities and add new features or customize Drupal's behavior and appearance. Because of this plug-in extensibility and modular design, Drupal is described as a content management framework. Drupal is also described as a web application framework, as it meets the generally accepted feature requirements for such frameworks.

Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.

Drupal runs on any computing platform that supports both a web server capable of running PHP (including Apache, IIS, Lighttpd, Hiawatha, Cherokee or Nginx) and a database (such as MySQL, MongoDB, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, or Microsoft SQL Server) to store content and settings. Drupal 6 requires PHP 4.4.0 or higher, while Drupal 7 requires PHP 5.2.5 or higher.

Drupal is Open Source

Drupal is open source software maintained and developed by a community of 630,000+ users and developers. It's distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or "GPL"), which means anyone is free to download it and share it with others. This open development model means that people are constantly working to make sure Drupal is a cutting-edge platform that supports the latest technologies that the Web has to offer. The Drupal project's principles encourage modularity, standards, collaboration, ease-of-use, and more.

Community Support

The passionate volunteer Drupal community is on hand to give support via various vibrant IRC channels, in the forums, and face to face at Drupal events. The community has also created Documentation for Drupal, which covers major topics related to working with Drupal. The worldwide community drives the innovation that makes Drupal the preferred choice for web developers and site owners. Everybody can get involved and make a difference to Drupal.

Drupal's History

Dries Buytaert began the Drupal software as a message board in 1999. Within a year or so, more people became interested using and contributing to Drupal, so the project was made open source. Drupal.org came online in 2001, and the Drupal community gained momentum in 2005 with several code sprints and conferences. Read more about the full history of Drupal and Druplicon.

Commercial Services

As well as the community, there are many dedicated companies in the Marketplace to help with your Drupal project. Providing expertise and a deeper understanding, they can help with design, development, hosting, spam blocking, theming, training, and more.

Technical Requirements

For Drupal , you need the following to get started:

    Web Server: Apache or Microsoft IIS
    PHP: 5.2 or higher
    Database Server: MySQL - 5.0 or higher, PostgreSQL - 8.3 or higher, or SQLite

Drupal is web-based, which means it is compatible with all operating systems.