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What is it?

Drupal is an open source modular framework and content management platform that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a Web site. It is written in PHP. Drupal is sometimes described as a Web application framework, as its capabilities go beyond content management to enabling a wide range of services and transactions. Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a bulletin board system, Drupal became an open source project in 2001.

Who is it for?

With a blend of features, Drupal supports a variety of Web sites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven Web sites. Many people and organizations use Drupal to power different Web sites, including community Web portals, discussion sites, corporate Web sites, Intranet applications, personal Web sites or blogs, aficionado sites, eCommerce applications, resource directories, and social networking sites.

Features

Drupal includes an easy to use Web installer. It combines built-in functionality with dozens of available add-on modules, enabling features such as content management systems, blogs, collaborative authoring environments, forums, peer-to-peer networking, podcasting, newsletters, picture galleries, file uploads and downloads, and much more. General features include a collaborative book feature that allows the user to setup a “book” and then authorize other individuals to contribute content, use of Apache’s mod_rewrite for enabling customizable URLs to be both user and search engine friendly, and community-contributed modules providing functionality beyond the Drupal core. The source code is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, making it available to extend or customize as needed. Drupal has also provided an online help system built into the core help text. A personalization environment is at the core of Drupal, meaning that both the content and the presentation can be individualized based on user-defined preferences.

Drupal administrators can assign permissions to roles and then group like users into a role group instead of having to perform the task individually. All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times with the built-in search module. User management features include user authentication, allowing users to register and authenticate locally or using an external authentication source like Jabber, Blogger, LiveJournal or another Drupal Web site. For use on an intranet, Drupal can integrate with an LDAP server. Content management features include a poll module, templating, threaded comments, and a version control system to track the details of content updates. Blogging features include blogger API support, content syndication, a news aggregator, and permalinks. Drupal also offers built-in discussion forum features for dynamic community sites.

Compatibility

Drupal runs in many environments, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and any platform that supports either the Apache or IIS Web server and the PHP language. Drupal was designed from the start to be multi-platform. Drupal requires a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL to store content and settings. It is built on top of a database abstraction layer. Other SQL databases can be supported by writing a supporting database backend containing fourteen functions and creating a matching SQL database scheme.

Drupal is designed to meet the requirements of an international audience and provides a full framework to create a multi-lingual Web site, 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.

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