What’s All the Buzz Surrounding Drupal?

If you ask 10 different people to describe Drupal, you will get 10 different responses. That is because Drupal is so many things. Open source social publishing software, a web content management system, a web content framework, a web applications framework; these are some of the answers you will receive. If you break down these answers you quickly find a couple key points that stand out.

Open Source

Drupal is open source. This means that no one owns the code that makes Drupal what it is. It is also FREE to download and FREE to modify. Indeed, a 10,000 plus sized developer community is making Drupal better all the time. Drupal is indeed a Web Content Management System (CMS). In the 21st century it is not acceptable to have a website that only a programmer can control. A robust CMS like Drupal allows the end user to add, delete, edit, moderate, and publish the content that is on their site. This puts the power of the website into the hands of the site-owner NOT keeping it in the hands of the site-developer.

Social Publishing Software

Drupal is social publishing software. The prevailing idea behind Web2.0 is to have user contributed content on your site. Drupal allows users to create content, blogs, articles, new groups, multimedia, etc. Drupal also allows finite control of permissions so that only allowed users can add specific types of content to the site.

Web Application Framework

Drupal is a Web Application Framework. If you have some new and inventive idea that has never before been done on the web, bring your napkin sketches to Drupal. The well documented and well designed Application Program Interface (API) will aid you in writing the code to allow Drupal to make your idea into reality.

Large Developer Community

Drupal is a LARGE and growing community. Drupal is controlled by no one but owned by everyone. The community thrives on a concept that is sometimes described as “Collaboration, not competition.” By doing this, the community organically forms into overlapping cells of teams that take on the necessary tasks that have made Drupal an enterprise level solution to the web development needs of mom-&-pops, NGOs, NFPs, and Fortune 500’s as well. The community successfully handles security updates, feature adds, accessibility concerns, and the ever changing integration methods employed by 3rd party entities such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.

Drupal continues to win awards every year in a variety of categories from a variety of sources. Many members of the Drupal community are celebrated authors, employees of major companies, holders of multiple degrees, and genuinely nice people who donate a lot of free time to grow and aide the Drupal project and community. More and more companies are leveraging Drupal to build large scale, feature rich sites in relatively short time spans. With Drupal and all of its add-on modules being free, companies can spend more of their resources on configuration rather than the old system where every new project started out with re-writing a lot of the same old code.