Information about Drupal

Drupal
Home page of a default Drupal installation (with a Lorem Ipsum article).
Latest release:	5.3 / October 17, 2007
OS:	Cross-platform
Genre:	Content management framework, Content management system, Community and Blog software
License:	GPL
Website:	[1]

Drupal (IPA pronunciation: [druː pʰəl]) is a free and open source modular content management system (CMS) written in the programming language PHP. A CMS is a tool used by Web administrators to automatically track online visitors and prepare customized content for consumption, usually as HTML-based Web pages. Drupal, like many modern CMSs, allows the system administrator to customize the content and display of the Web site with little or no programming.

Drupal runs in many environments, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and any platform that supports either the Apache (version 1.3+), or IIS (version IIS5+) Web server and the PHP language (version 4.3.3+). Drupal requires a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL to store content and settings. (Requirements are available at Drupal's web site).

As of October 17, 2007, the current version of Drupal is 5.3.^[1] The first beta release of Version 6.0, which has reached "feature freeze," occurred on September 15, 2007.

History

Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a bulletin board system, Drupal became an open source project in 2001. Drupal is an English transliteration of the Dutch word “,” which means “drop” (as in “a water droplet”). The name was taken from the now-defunct Drop.org website, whose code slowly evolved into Drupal. Buytaert 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.^[2]

From May 2006 to April 2007, Drupal was downloaded from the Drupal.org website more than 600,000 times.^[3] A large community now helps develop Drupal.^[4]

Design

Web administrators, designers, and programmers have praised Drupal's modular design, which allows its basic layer, or "core", to provide essential features in its default configuration. Functions and presentation can be added through pluggable modules and themes.^[5].

Drupal modules can "override" the core's built-in features, extending or even replacing Drupal's default behavior without directly manipulating the programmed code in Drupal's core files. This increases flexibility and security, and helps defeat SQL injection.

Custom themes, which can be added without disturbing Drupal's core, use standardized formats that can be generated by third-party theme design engines.

Modules

The Drupal core has been designed with a system of hooks, or callbacks, that allow modules to insert functions into Drupal's path of execution.

Modules included in Drupal's core enable users to:

• Post, revise, and categorize content
• Conduct searches
• Post comments
• Take part in forums
• Vote in polls
• Work on collaborative writing projects
• Post and view personal profiles
• Communicate among themselves or with the managers of a site
• Change the look of a site with off-the-shelf or custom-made themes
• Build multi-level menus
• Provide users with an interface in their local language
• Provide RSS feeds
• Gather content from the RSS feeds of other sites
• Register and manage user accounts
• Assign fine-grained user roles, granting users permission to use selected features of a site
• Use access rules to deny site access to specified usernames, e-mail addresses, and IP addresses
• Provide statistics and reports for administrators
• Manage caching and throttling to improve how a site performs in heavy traffic
• Construct and specify various input filters and content types
• Generate user-friendly, easy-to-remember URLs (for example, "www.mysite.com/products" rather than "www.mysite.com/?q=node/432)

The Drupal website provides hundreds of free modules written by the Drupal community, which provide:

• e-commerce systems
• Workflow features
• Photo galleries
• Organic groups
• Google sitemaps
• Amazon Items^[6]
• Mailing list management
• Integration with CVS

System version tracking

update_status, a relatively new module available for 5.x (and being introduced as part of core in 6.0) automatically notifies the administrator of any new releases to installed modules and themes.

Themes

Most themes for Drupal are written in the PHPTemplate engine^[7] or the XTemplate engine^[8]. Earlier templates used hard-coded PHP.

Earlier versions of Drupal's theming system were criticized ^[9] as being less design-oriented and more complicated than the systems for Mambo and Plone. The inclusion of the PHPTemplate and XTemplate engines in Drupal has addressed some of these criticisms.

Translations

As of August 2007, translations for Drupal's interface were available in 37 languages plus English (the default).^[10] Some read right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Criticism

Some^[11] have considered Drupal more difficult to learn and slightly more difficult to install than some simple CMS programs or basic blogging tools such as WordPress. Drupal 5.0, released January 15, 2007, is packaged with a Web-based installer to partly answer these criticisms, and Drupal 6.0, currently in beta, goes even further in simplifying installation.^[12]

Some programmers criticize Drupal because they perceive it as not being OOP, but Drupal programming from an object-oriented perspective explains how OOP and AOP principles apply to Drupal.

Distributions

Customized Drupal distributions include some repackaged with third-party modules, some with modifications to the core, including vbDrupal, which is Drupal integrated with vBulletin.

Drupal 4.2 ^[13] was used for DeanSpace, which hosted many independent Web sites 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." Thus CivicSpace is a spinoff distribution based on Drupal 4.2.

Many innovations in CivicSpace have been incorporated back into the Drupal project itself^[14]. Features particularly useful for nonprofit organizations and political campaigns are provided in the CiviCRM module for Drupal 5.0 and higher.

It has been suggested to distribute "pre-made" Drupal installations that are pre-customized with third party modules and configured towards a particular type of Web site: an online store, a music review site, a blogging site, etc.

See also

• Content management system
• List of content management systems

Notes

Further reading

• Crumlish, Christian. The Power of Many: How the Living Web Is Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life. San Francisco: Sybex, 2004. ISBN 0782143466.
• Douglass, Robert T., Mike Little, and Jared W. Smith. Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress. New York: Springer Verlag/Apress, 2005. ISBN 1590595629.
• Gillmor, Dan. We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People. Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly, 2004. ISBN 0-596-00733-7.
• Graf, Hagen. Drupal. Community-Websites entwickeln und verwalten mit dem Open Source-CMS. Munich: Addison-Wesley, 2006. ISBN 3827323215. (German)
• Mercer, David. Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites. Birmingham, England: Packt Publishing, 2006. ISBN 1904811809.
• Trippi, Joe. . New York: ReganBooks, 2004. ISBN 0-06-076155-5.
• VanDyk, John K., and Matt Westgate. Pro Drupal Development. New York: Springer Verlag/Apress, 2007. ISBN 1590597559.

External links

• Drupal website
• Documentation for developers
• Drupal Cookbook (for New Drupallers)
• Drupal Association
• Drupal Video Tutorials
• Drupal Developer directory