Drupal is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) with a large, supportive community. It’s used by millions of people and organizations around the globe to build and maintain their websites. You probably use Drupal every day without knowing it, as many top businesses and government organizations use Drupal, like the Government of Australia, Red Cross, Harvard, The Economist, BBC, NBC News, Whole Foods, Cisco, Twitter, and many, many more.

Drupal is open source software released under the GNU Public License. This means it has inherent benefits–cost, flexibility, freedom, security, and accountability–that are unmatched by proprietary software. For example, Drupal is free to download and anyone can modify and extend the platform. This ensures freedom from vendor “lock in” and it empowers users worldwide to monitor Drupal’s underlying code for compliance and security issues and fix them quickly.

Full of features and highly customizable

Drupal shines as a CMS. It provides a user interface that allows you to create and publish your content easily. The platform accommodates unlimited content types, including text and media content, with highly customizable forms. It dynamically retrieves, filters, and presents this content with powerful, yet simple-to-use tools. There are also intuitive content creation tools and powerful in-place editing tools. Drupal controls access to content and features with its sophisticated user role classification and permissions system.

All of the administrative and end-user-facing functionality in Drupal, from fundamental features, such as the ability to log in or create content to dynamic photo galleries and complex voting systems, comes from modules. What you download from Drupal.org is what is referred to as “Drupal core” and it comes packed with all of the most commonly used modules to build a site, but there is a huge variety of contributed modules, which thousands of developers make available for free on Drupal.org.

Drupal is also a powerful website development platform. Drupal adheres to modern object-oriented programming patterns, PHP best practices, HTML5 and YAML standards. It also incorporates other great web technologies, including CKEditor, Symfony2, Twig, jQuery, Backbone.js, and Guzzle. Extending functionality and gaining complete control over the design is accomplished through a robust assortment of add-ons in the form of modules and themes.

Open Source

The term “Open source” defines software whose source code is made publicly available. They are eligible for use and modification by users, developers subject to certain conditions.

What makes an open source technology popular and favourable is:

• There’s no money cost for people to use the software.
• A big community (Users, developers, admin) exists to help one another.
• The software is stable because many developers & experts are testing it day by day. Should a trouble arise, a related request can be instantly submitted and resolved.
• Many open sources like Drupal are under the GNU Public License. That means the software is utterly free to download, use, and modify: There is no requirement for purchase, license, or maintenance fees.

Content Management System

In general, the CMS empowers content authors to manage website contents but do not own necessary technical skills to edit raw content. Specifically, it helps:

• Provide simple Web-based tools so that users can publish content directly to the website. E.g. Drupal provides a WYSIWYG editing tool that is similar to Word processing software of Microsoft.
• Control content author. As a web manager, you will able to control what is created, how the content is edited, formatted and reviewed. You can make some rules about the contents – to name a few: limit the character number in a content field; enable content items to follow a workflow process; require content fields such as page title, page path.
• Smoothen and boost the process. As your website grows into more than a few pages, and a number of formats, users,… content will become complex. To quicken this process, the CMS will make it easy to manage them all, and render them in quick and mass configuration.

What are the uses of Drupal?

As stated, due to its flexibility and extensibility, Drupal is not limited to any kind. Browse these lists to see the wide range of things that Drupal can build:

• Personal or corporate Web sites
• Community portal sites
• Intranet/Corporate sites
• Blogs, art, portfolio, music, multimedia sites
• Forums
• International sites (websites with multi languages)
• E-commerce sites
• Resource directories
• Social networking sites