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What is Drupal?

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.

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:

  • Access statistics and logging
  • Advanced search functionalities
  • Blogs, books, comments, forums, and polls
  • Caching and feature throttling for improved performance under load
  
  • Descriptive URLs (for example, "www.example.com/products" rather than "www.example.com/?q=node/432")
  • Multi-level menu system
  
  • Multi-site support[18]
  • Multi-user content creation and editing
  • OpenID support
  • RSS Feed and Feed Aggregator
  
  • Security/new release update notification
  • User profiles
  • Various access control restrictions (user roles, IP addresses, email)
  • Workflow tools (Triggers and Actions)

Webware 100 Winner

Drupal has been used on several popular and professional sites. One of the most notable is The Onion, the satirical news publication, as well as MTV's Web site in the United Kingdom. In its latest iteration, version 6, it has added support for drag-and-drop, OpenID logins, and an editor that can be tuned to suit both left, and right viewing cultures.

Winner: Drupal (Drupal.org)
Category: Publishing

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13546_109-9913290-29.html