Drupal (pronounced /ˈdruːpal/) is a free and open source Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP. It is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License.
The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to most CMSs. These include the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts, administration menus, RSS-feeds, customizable layout, flexible account privileges, logging, a blogging system, an Internet forum, and options to create a classic brochureware website or an interactive community website.
Drupal was also designed to allow new features and custom behavior to be added by third parties. For this reason, Drupal is sometimes described as a content management framework. Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.
Drupal can run on any computing platform that supports both a web server capable of running PHP version 4.3.5+ (including Apache, IIS, Lighttpd, and nginx) and a database (such as MySQL or PostgreSQL) to store content and settings.
History
Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board, Drupal became an open source project in 2001.[6] Drupal is an English rendering of the Dutch word “druppel”, 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”) for its community aspects, but made a typo when checking the domain name and thought it sounded better.
From May 2007 to April 2008, Drupal was downloaded from the Drupal.org website more than 1.4 million times, an increase of approximately 125% from the previous year. A large community now helps develop Drupal.
Drupal's popularity is growing rapidly. Over 70 well-known brand names and not-for-profit organizations now use Drupal.
As of July 2009, Drupal 6.13 is the latest release. Drupal is a winner of several Packt Open Source CMS Awards and three times (in a row) a winner in the Webware 100.
Drupal core
Drupal core is the stock installation of Drupal, which can be optionally extended by third party contributions. In Drupal's default configuration, website content can be contributed by either registered or anonymous users (at the discretion of the administrator) and made accessible to web visitors by a variety of selectable criteria including by date, category, searches, etc. Drupal core also includes a hierarchical taxonomy system, which allows content to be categorized or tagged with key words for easier access.
Drupal maintains a detailed changelog of core feature updates by version.
Core modules
Drupal core includes core modules which can be enabled by the administrator to extend the functionality of the core website.
The core Drupal distribution provides a number of features, including:
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Core themes
Drupal core includes several core themes, which customize the aesthetic look-and-feel of the site. These themes can be chosen by the administrator via a special menu.
The Color Module, introduced in Drupal core 5.0, allows administrators to change the color scheme of certain themes via a Web-browser interface. This feature was added to allow a higher level of customization for the average non-coder.
Translations
As of February 2008, translations for Drupal's interface were available in 44 languages plus English (the default).[21] Some read right to left, such as Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew. Drupal 6 provides improved support for content and content administration in multiple languages.
Auto-update notification
Drupal can automatically notify the administrator when a new version of any module, theme, or the Drupal core itself, becomes available. This feature can help keep a Drupal installation up-to-date with the latest features and security fixes.
An auto-update module for the older version 5.x provides identical functionality, but it is not included in the core release.
Extending Drupal core
Drupal core is designed to be modular with a system of hooks and callbacks, which are accessed internally via an API. This design allows third-party contributed (often abbreviated to "contrib") modules and themes to extend or override Drupal's default behaviors without changing Drupal core's code.
Drupal's modular design, which isolates Drupal core's files from contributed module and themes, increases flexibility and security and allows Drupal administrators to cleanly upgrade to new releases of Drupal core without potentially overwriting their site's customizations.[citation needed] To maintain this separation, Drupal administrators are instructed to avoid altering Drupal core's software.
Contributed modules
Contributed Drupal modules offer a variety of features including image galleries, custom content types and content listings, WYSIWYG editors, private messaging, 3rd-party integration tools, and more. The Drupal website lists over 4600 free modules (as of August 1, 2009), written and contributed to by the Drupal community.[26][27][28]
- Content Construction Kit (CCK)allows site administrators to dynamically create content types. A content type describes any kind of information to be stored in the website's database. These may include, but are not limited to, events, invitations, reviews, articles, or products.
- Viewsfacilitates the retrieval and presentation of content to site visitors.
The CCK Fields API has been integrated into Drupal core in the development Drupal 7 branch.
Contributed themes
Contributed themes adapt or replace a Drupal site's default look and feel.
Drupal themes use standardized formats that may be generated by common third-party theme design engines. Many themes for Drupal are written in the PHPTemplate engine or, to a lesser extent, the XTemplate engine. Some templates use hard-coded PHP.
Although early versions of Drupal's theming system were criticized for being less design-oriented and more complicated than those for Mambo, Joomla! and Plone, the inclusion of the PHPTemplate and XTemplate engines in Drupal has addressed some of these concerns.[citation needed] The new Drupal 6 theming system utilizes a template engine in an attempt to further separate HTML/CSS from PHP. A new Drupal development module, Devel, provides assistance to theme authors who use Drupal 6.
Community contributed Drupal themes at the Drupal website are released under GPL license (free), and most of them are demonstrated at the Drupal Theme Garden
Criticism
- Usability: Some aspects of Drupal's administration interface can be confusing and intimidating, particularly for new administrators. According to the Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore, Drupal lacks an intuitive, easy administration user interface. The administration area is regarded as clunky and cryptic with Drupal version 5 and 6, but improved ease of use is planned with the upcoming version 7. According to Dries Buytaert, Drupal 7 won't be released until 90% of the problems identified by the University of Minnesota and the University of Baltimore are solved. Usability will be one of the main improvements in Drupal 7 that will close the gap with easier CMSs.
- Learning curve: According to blog site newassignment.net, some users have described Drupal as having a fairly steep learning curve.
- Backward Compatibility (for software development): Drupal's designers have decided that, in terms of programming, backward compatibility may be sacrificed with each major revision.[41] As a result, sometimes a new version's code is not compatible with a previous version. This means that contrib module and theme developers may be required to re-work some or all of their previous code to ensure compatibility with the latest version of Drupal.
- Performance / Scalability: In 2006, performance tests between Drupal 4.x and Joomla 1.x branch demonstrated that Drupal's Web pages were delivered 44% slower compared with Joomla. To improve performance, Drupal offers caching to store static pages, the use of which resulted in a 508% improvement. However, static pages are typically only delivered to anonymous visitors who have not logged in. Thus, dramatic performance improvements from caching may not reflect real-world usage of a Drupal site. Like performance, scalability, or the ability for a Web site to handle a growing number of concurrent visitors, can become a concern on large interactive sites. Scalability is typically improved by optimizations of the code.[citation needed] Particularly, SQL query caching can help offset the load to the database server caused by Drupal's high query rate. Since version 6, Drupal caches database schema as well as elements such as blocks, forms and menus. Development versions of Drupal 7 increase performance in database queries with simultaneous performance decreases in PHP code usage.
Security
As security holes are discovered, Drupal core is regularly[clarification needed] updated to new versions. Administrators of Drupal sites are automatically notified of these new releases via the Update Status module. Additionally, Drupal.org maintains a security announcement mailing list, a history of all security advisories, a security team home page, and an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. In 2008, eleven security vulnerabilities were reported and fixed in Drupal core. Security holes were also found and fixed in 64 of the 2243 user-contributed modules.
Maintainers of Drupal modules can decline to follow contemporary security recommendations. For example, the Views module maintainer declines to adopt security by design, instead allowing the module's default configuration to expose content the site maintainer might otherwise want hidden from the public.
Distributions
Customized Drupal distributions include some repackaged third-party modules, some with modifications to the core, including vbDrupal, which is Drupal integrated with vBulletin.
Drupal 4.2 [52] was used for DeanSpace, which hosted many independent websites supporting the 2004 U.S. 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."
Acquia
In 2007, a Drupal-focused company, Acquia, was created by Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson. Acquia announced a subscription-based service for Drupal at Drupalcon Boston 2008 and started services with Acquia Drupal, a distribution based on Drupal 6, in September 2008. Subscriptions include one or more Drupal distributions, a set of companion network-supplied value-add services, and access to a Technical Assistance Center.
Community
Drupal has a large community of users and developers. More than 550,000 user accounts have been created on Drupal.org, and over 2000 people have signed up for developer accounts. The Drupal conference happens twice a year. The next conference is happening in Paris, France. The last major conference in the USA, Drupalcon Washington DC 2009, attracted over 1400 people. The last European conference, Drupalcon Szeged 2008, held in late August 2008, had an attendance of 500.
There are a number of active Drupal forums, mailing lists
and discussion groupsThere are over 20 national communities around drupal.org offering language-specific support.
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