Overview of Drupal, an open source content management platform.

I wrote the following for a client and thought I should post it.

Broadly speak, drupal is an open source content management platform, writing in PHP and licensed under the GPL.  Most commonly run on Linux with Apache and MySQL, and frequently used with MS SQL and IIS, with support for Oracle being added.

Drupal’s Principles

• Modular and extensible.  Drupal aims to provide a slim, powerful core that can be readily extended through custom modules.
  
  • Meaning you never patch the core modules, making upgrades much more straight forward.
• Quality coding.  High quality, elegant, documented code is a priority over roughed-in functionality.
• Standards-based.  Drupal supports established and emerging standards.  Specific target standards include XHTML and CSS.
• Low resource demands.  To ensure excellent performance, Drupal puts a premium on low-profile coding (for example, minimizing database queries).  Drupal should also have minimal, widely-available server-side software requirements.  Specifically, Drupal should be fully operational on a server with Apache web server, PHP, and either MySQL or Postgresql.
• Open source.  Drupal is based on the open source philosophy of collaborative free software development and is licensed under the GPL.  Drupal is itself open source and builds on and supports other open source projects.  Specifically, Drupal is coded in the open source scripting language PHP and supports as primary data sources the open source database formats MySQL and Postgresql.
• Ease of use.  Drupal aims for a high standard of usability for developers, administrators, and users.
• Collaboration.  Drupal development supports open, collaborative information sharing systems and approaches.

Getting Started with Drupal

• Here is a 51 page PDF on getting started with drupal
  
  • http://drupal.org/files/getting-started_2.pdf
• Getting beyond the basics
  
  • http://drupal.org/handbook/customization   
• There are a number of tutorials on YouTube for drupal
  
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GeuTjYqNHg&feature=related  

Additional resources

• Lullabot
  
  • The good folks over at http://www.lullabot.com/ have put together a good series of articles, podcasts (mp3s) and even written a book about understand drupal.
• Google
  
  • Google has provided a great deal of code and resources (20 to 30 paid interns a summer for several years now) which usually take the form of contributed modules (see below)
• IBM’s developer works
  
  • IBM’s developer works selected drupal for an in depth 15 article series
  • http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/osource/implement.html
• Local consultants
  
  • Portland has quite a few local consultants who specialize in drupal and I assist with several drupal based website outside the county.

Contributed modules

The drupal community includes a very lengthy list of contributed modules, if you feel like scrolling for a while, check out full list (  http://drupal.org/project/Modules/name ) though the list of categories is likely more useful.   Also the website http://drupalmodules.com includes additional about the modules, with content and rankings supplied by the community.

• 3rd party integration (323)
• Administration (253)
• CCK (174)
  
  • Short for “Content Creation Kit”, a very flexible toolkit for making forms (content type to be specific) and setting up relationships between fields in other forms.
• Commerce / advertising (86)
• Community (185)
• Content (430)
• Content display (461)
• Developer (178)
• e-Commerce (80)
• Evaluation/rating (69)
• Event (45)
• File management (59)
• Filters/editors (151)
• Import/export (71)
• Javascript Utilities (110)
• Location (43)
• Mail (108)
• Media (159)
• Multilingual (28)
• Organic Groups (53)
• Paging (20)
• RDF (15)
• Search (70)
• Security (59)
• Syndication (64)
• Taxonomy (132)
  
  • Every page (a node to be specific) has the ability to be associated with terms in one or many taxonomies and later browseable or  filterable using views (see below) or a variety of other
• Theme related (122)
• User access/authentication (146)
• User management (135)
• Utility (443)
• Views (108)
  
  • Used closely with the CCK, basically you create a form (content type) and then selectively display fields in various layouts (tabular, list, calendar, …) with different sorting and filtering options.