About Drupal

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

Drupal is ready to go from the moment you download it. It even has an easy-to-use web installer! The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

• Content Management Systems
• Blogs
• Collaborative authoring environments
• Forums
• Peer-to-peer networking
• Newsletters
• Podcasting
• Picture galleries
• File uploads and downloads

and much more.

Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL ("GNU General Public License") and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. If you like what Drupal promises for you, please work with us to expand and refine Drupal to suit your specific needs.

Features

General features

Collaborative Book - Our unique collaborative book feature lets you setup a "book" and then authorize other individuals to contribute content.

Friendly URLs - Drupal uses Apache's mod_rewrite to enable customizable URLs that are both user and search engine friendly.

Modules - The Drupal community has contributed many modules which provide functionality that extend Drupal core.

Online help - Like many Open Source projects, we can't say that our online help is perfect but have built a robust online help system built into the core help text. Available to you on your own site.

Open source - The source code of Drupal is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License 2 (GPL). Unlike proprietary blogging or content management systems, Drupal's feature set is fully available to extend or customize as needed.

Personalization - A robust personalization environment is at the core of Drupal. Both the content and the presentation can be individualized based on user-defined preferences.

Role based permission system - Drupal administrators don't have to tediously setup permissions for each user. Instead, they assign permissions to roles and then group like users into a role group.

Searching - All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times if you take advantage of the built in search module.

User management

User authentication - Users can register and authenticate locally or using an external authentication source like Jabber, Blogger, LiveJournal or another Drupal website. For use on an intranet, Drupal can integrate with an LDAP server.

Content management

Polls - Drupal comes with a poll module which enables admins and/or users to create polls and show them on various pages.

Templating - Drupal's theme system separates content from presentation allowing you to control the look and feel of your Drupal site. Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP coding meaning that you don't have to learn a proprietary templating language.

Threaded comments - Drupal provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum.

Version control - Drupal's version control system tracks the details of content updates including who changed it, what was changed, the date and time of changes made to your content and more. Version control features provide an option to keep a comment log and enables you to roll-back content to an earlier version.

Blogging

Blogger API support - The Blogger API allows your Drupal site to be updated by many different tools. This includes non-web browser based tools that provide a richer editing environment.

Content syndication - Drupal exports your site's content in RDF/RSS format for others to gather. This lets anyone with a News Aggregator browse your Drupal sites feeds.

News aggregator - Drupal has a powerful built-in News Aggregator for reading and blogging news from other sites. The News Aggregator caches articles to your MySQL database and its caching time is user configurable.

Note: This prevents losing track of your news as in other aggregators when you're offline for a few days.

Permalinks - All content created in Drupal has a permanent link or "perma link" associated with it so people can link to it freely without fear of broken links.

Platform

Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X support - Drupal was designed from the start to be multi-platform. Not only can you use it with either Apache or Microsoft IIS but we also have Drupal running on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms.

Database independence - While many of our users run Drupal with MySQL, we knew that MySQL wasn't the solution for everyone. Drupal is built on top of a database abstraction layer that enables you to use Drupal with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Other SQL databases can be supported by writing a supporting database backend containing fourteen functions and creating a matching SQL database scheme.

Multi-language - Drupal is designed to meet the requirements of an international audience and provides a full framework to create a multi-lingual website, blog, content management system or community application. All text can be translated using a graphical user interface, by importing existing translations, or by integrating with other translation tools such as the GNU gettext.

Administration and analysis

Analysis, Tracking and Statistics - Drupal can print browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate your site.

Logging and Reporting - All important activities and system events are captured in an event log to be reviewed by an administrator at a later time.

Web based administration - Drupal can be administered entirely using a web browser, making it possible to access it from around the world and requires no additional software to be installed on your computer.

Community features

Discussion forums - Full discussion forum features are built into Drupal to create lively, dynamic community sites.

Performance and scalability

Caching - The caching mechanism eliminates database queries increasing performance and reducing the server's load. Not only can the caching be tuned in real time, while your site is under load, but it has been successfully tested under a "slashdotting" and performed extremely well.

Mission

By building on relevant standards and open source technologies, Drupal supports and enhances the potential of the Internet as a medium where diverse and geographically-separated individuals and groups can collectively produce, discuss, and share information and ideas. With a central interest in and focus on communities and collaboration, Drupal's flexibility allows the collaborative production of online information systems and communities.

Principles

• Modular and extensible. Drupal aims to provide a slim, powerful core that can be readily extended through custom modules.
• Quality coding. High quality, elegant, documented code is a priority over roughed-in functionality.
• Standards-based. Drupal supports established and emerging standards.  Specific target standards include XHTML and CSS.
• Low resource demands. To ensure excellent performance, Drupal puts a premium on low-profile coding (for example, minimizing database queries).  Drupal should also have minimal, widely-available server-side software requirements.  Specifically, Drupal should be fully operational on a server with Apache web server, PHP, and either MySQL or Postgresql.
• Open source. Drupal is based on the open source philosophy of collaborative free software development and is licensed under the GPL.  Drupal is itself open source and builds on and supports other open source projects.  Specifically, Drupal is coded in the open source scripting language PHP and supports as primary data sources the open source database formats MySQL and Postgresql.
• Ease of use. Drupal aims for a high standard of usability for developers, administrators, and users.
• Collaboration. Drupal development supports open, collaborative information sharing systems and approaches.

History

In 2000, permanent Internet connections were at a premium for University of Antwerp students, so Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder set up a wireless bridge between their student dorms to share Hans's ADSL modem connection among eight students. While this was an extremely luxurious situation at that time, something was missing: There was no means to discuss or share simple things.

This inspired Dries to work on a small news site with a built-in web board, allowing the group of friends to leave each other notes about the status of the network, to announce where they were having dinner, or to share some noteworthy news items.

The software did not have a name until the day after Dries moved out after graduation. The group decided to put the internal website online so they could stay in touch, keep sharing interesting findings, and narrate snippets of their personal lives. While looking for a suitable domain name, Dries settled for 'drop.org' after he made a typo to see if the the name 'dorp.org' was still available. Dorp is the Dutch word for 'village', which was considered a fitting name for the small community.

Once drop.org was established on the Web, its audience changed as the members began talking about new web technologies, such as moderation, syndication, rating, and distributed authentication. Drop.org slowly turned into a personal experimentation environment, driven by the discussions and flow of ideas. The discussions about these web technologies were tried out on drop.org itself as new additions to the software running the site.

It was only later, in January 2001, that Dries decided to release the software behind drop.org as "Drupal." The purpose was to enable others to use and extend the experimentation platform so that more people could explore new paths for development. The name Drupal, pronounced "droo-puhl," derives from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word "druppel," which means "drop."