Introduction to Drupal Part 2
Here is part 2 of my Introduction to Drupal series.
Drupal is a popular Content Management System
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This means that the user can add new content and edit existing content.
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It is built with PHP and mySQL so it provides dynamic content
Drupal is Open Source
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no license fees
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available as a free download at Drupal.org
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maintained by global community of volunteers
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software is frequently updated to improve security, fix bugs and add new features
Drupal is used to build websites both large and small. Here are some of the companies, non-profits and musicians using Drupal as their website of choice:
Drupal is Modular
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Drupal consists of Drupal core (a group of core modules) that is available as a free download at drupal.org
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There are hundreds of additional modules called contributed that are also available as a free download from drupal.org
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There are also many free themes that you can download for free and install on your website
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So it’s easy to add new features to your website by adding contributed modules. For example, need an Wysiwyg editor? You can choose from CKeditor or tinyMCE
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For example, need to add a message board? Download and install Advanced Forum. I used it for Drupal 6 and it worked very well.
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Many developers have a list of must-have modules to build a starting set of functionality for their websites
Drupal is Scalable
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Drupal is powerful and flexible
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Can be used to build small brochure sites for small businesses
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It can also be used to build more complex sites for example social networking site like facebook.com eg. DrupalSN.com
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Twitter.com uses Drupal as a platform for their website
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Grammy.com is built with Drupal and they needed to be able to handle the immense surge of traffic during the Grammy Awards. This was accomplished with Drupal
Comparisons with Joomla and Wordpress
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Joomla and Wordpress are quite popular with designers and have shorter learning curves
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With Drupal you can create any type of custom content type that you wish
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You can easily place text and images in a block in any region. I had trouble doing this in Wordpress
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I think the power of Drupal is showcased by the strength of the Taxonomy system and Views
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With Drupal Views you can query the database and display the data as you wish
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For example, I built an online news website with Drupal in about 5-6 hours
