Drupal Developers' Own Content Management System

Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) that has got a great deal of attention recently, based not only on its powerful set of features but also its use on some extremely high-profile websites. So what ma es Drupal so special that it!s running sites for entities li e "ahoo, #arner $rothers %ecords, Mensa, &buntu, 'inden 'abs, (he )nion, *orbes, +)', and oh yes, don!t forget the #hite ,ouseDrupal started as a $$S.forum.message board written by a single person, got a large number of enthusiastic followers, and became open source. $ut instead of descending into near-anarchy the way some similar pro/ects ha0e been nown to do, the Drupal de0elopers thought ahead calmly, and ended up with some interesting and useful standard features1

Search 2ngine *riendly with configurable &%'s 3nternational support for literally do4ens of languages, including those reading right-to-left Security is integral to Drupal. Drupal was designed to be a secure application framewor and e0en has a dedicated security team 5ortably runs on &nix, 'inux, Mac )S 6, #indows, $SD, and Solaris under either +pache or 33S *lexible user management, from authentication 7 which can be done externally through an 'D+5 ser0er to eep corporate 3( departments happy or using )pen3D 7 to user profiles, role-based permissions, and other access control methods 8ot /ust a blog that can be extended, basic Drupal can be used as a blog, a forum, or a wi i, a standard website, or all at the same time, with the ability to add (or not) comments, polls, and tags almost anywhere %e0ision control lets you archi0e e0ery edit to a page, if you li e, so you can reco0er old content Serious features for power users. )ut of the box, Drupal has ad0anced logging to ri0al 9oogle +nalytics: support for multiple sites on a single ser0er: a multile0el menu system: ad0anced taxonomy and search system: and caching.feature throttling to let the system respond well under hea0y loads

+nd on top of all that, Drupal has the flexibility and extendability of thousands of freely-a0ailable extensions, such as themes, modules, profiles, and e0en a complete ecommerce solution. So 3!ll be examining Drupal in detail in this series of articles, similar to the approach 3 too in the #ord5ress series.

A Fresh Start With Drupal 'i e most CMS pro/ects, Drupal runs on '+M5 ('inux.+pache.MyS;'.5,5) systems, so if you already ha0e a ser0er set up, you could /ust download the current 0ersion and start unpac ing. 3 already had enough extra stuff on my web ser0er, so 3 installed Drupal on top of 6+M55 for #indows for testing on my des top system. Since then, 3!0e found there!s a much better way1 you can download a complete, free ready-to-go system from +c<uia that is meant specifically for testing and e0aluation of Drupal on any #indows =>-bit or 3ntel Mac )S 6 system. 3t!s similar to 6+M55 (in fact, they call it D+M5), but it!s preconfigured so you don!t ha0e to play with it or install anything separate in order to get Drupal running. *or e0ery new pro/ects, Drupal developers do thin twice as they want picture perfect finish for each of their pro/ects. (o do this, no content management system can support them than Drupal. (oday, managing mobile websites built on Drupal is also challenging. So, those professionals ma e sure that they are aware of all mobili4ing Drupal concepts so that they deli0er their client pro/ects on time.