Drupal
Installation | |
Built-in features | |
Security management | |
Performance | |
Editorial Features | |
Themes & templates | |
Plugins & extensions | |
SEO friendliness | |
Multilingual support | |
Ease of use | |
Support community |
Publisher | : Drupal.org |
Latest version | : 6.14 |
Platform | : PHP 4/5 + mySQL 5.x |
License type | : GNU GPL Version 2 |
CMS type | : CMS & Blog publishing |
A content management system (CMS) is a software package that helps you in creating and administrating a website. An open source CMS is developed by a community of developers which is free to be downloaded and used. These CMS are primarily used by most nonprofit organizations. Drupal is open source CMS which is used by numbers of bloggers and website owners to manage their blogs and websites. The standard release of Drupal is called Drupal Core. Drupal has an edge over its competitors in the area of development and customization. It is also referred to as a content management framework. It can run on any web server capable of running PHP and use its My SQL database sever.
Drupal was developed by Dried Buytaert as a message board, which on further development became an open source project. Drupal means a droplet in Dutch. Initially Buytaert wanted to call this a “dorp” (name of a Dutch Village community since Drupal is backed by very good community of developers)
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Main features
Drupal resembles a developer platform rather than a traditional CMS. It being so developer friendly that it takes some time for users to become familiar with it and requires some php development skills. Drupal is powered by a number of core modules which cannot be found be in any other CMS. Added to that it contains themes and translators that contribute to the developers merry. Its developer friendly nature allows the site administrators to create dynamic content. Security is also given high priority and is considered superior to other alternatives. Structural flexibility is the key to organize complex content and Drupal outshines others in this area. It offers profiles, blogs and comments with enhancements available through add on modules.
Roadmap & Philosophy
The latest stable release is 6.14. One can see Drupal being synonymous to developer’s functionality, structural and graphical flexibility with great security, integration and equally good community strength. Drupal has great features that even the official white house website has been managed by Drupal and some high traffic sites like ubuntu. Drupal has won best PHP content management system awards consecutively from past two years.
Developers
Core development team; Dougal Campbell, Mark Jaquith, Donncha Ó Caoimh, Andy Skelton, Michel Valdrighi and Peter Westwood
Moronica Harrison wrote:
When i started being a webmaster, i had only very poor html knowledge, so i had to teach myself php, mysql and css basics to get over the issues i had; first, with the installation of Drupal itself and later, with configuring the many modules needed for my page. It took me five months to get to a point were the page is now nearly finished. And i just wanted to say some words about my experience with the community and with my installation of Drupal itself.
When i first started and i had to decide on a CMS, i ended up with the choice between Drupal and Joomla, as both of them had a big community and i knew i would need plenty of help to get my page up in the next 6 months.
but i really had hard time at the beginning. And now because i’m not a programmer it is often hard for me to judge if the problem is in the module or me. And because there is, on the most part, not very good documentation, i’m just left behind with a bunch of questions and this irritates me much.
You should be having a great knowledge about web, php, mysql to cope with this script i think
Rahul wrote:
Drupal is a free open source content management system available from drupal.org. Designed for mid to high usage sites Drupal is a powerful and expandable system.
Pros
•Free
•Highly scalable
•Very expandable
•Large support base
Cons
•Steep learning curve
•Lack of themes
•Confusing terminology
•Requires customising
Drupal is very easy to install simply create a database in mysql or your preferred database engine noting the username and password. Upload the Drupal files to the server and navigate to the root directory. A wizard will guide you through the rest of the install and make required configurations to files.