Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board, Drupal became an open source project in 2001.^[6]Drupal is an English rendering of the Dutch word “druppel”, which means “drop” (as in “a water droplet”).^[7] The name was taken from the now-defunct Drop.org website, whose code slowly evolved into Drupal. Buytaert wanted to call the site “dorp” (Dutch for “village”, referring to its community aspects), but made a typo when checking the domain name and thought it sounded better.^[6]

From May 2007 to April 2008, Drupal was downloaded from the Drupal.org website more than 1.4 million times, an increase of approximately 125% from the previous year.^[8][9] A large community now helps develop Drupal.^[10]

Drupal's popularity is growing rapidly. Over 70 well-known brand names and not-for-profit organizations now use Drupal. ^[11]

As of February 2009, Drupal 6.10 is the latest release.^[12] Drupal is a winner of several Packt Open Source CMS Awards.^[13]

Notes

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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Video: The Drupal Song Music Video

The color editor being used to adjust the "Garland" core theme

Drupal core is the "stock" installation of Drupal, which can be optionally extended by third party contributions. In Drupal's default configuration, website content can be contributed by either registered or anonymous users (at the discretion of the administrator) and made accessible to web visitors by a variety of selectable criteria including by date, category, searches, etc. Drupal core also includes a hierarchical taxonomy system, which allows content to be categorized or "tagged" with key words for easier access.^[1]

Drupal maintains a detailed changelog of core feature updates by version.^[2]

Core modules

Drupal core includes "core modules" which can be enabled by the administrator to extend the functionality of the core website.^[2]

The core Drupal distribution provides a number of features^[3], including:

• Access statistics and logging
• Advanced search functions
• Caching and feature throttling for improved performance under load
• Comments, forums, and polls
• Descriptive URLs (for example, "www.example.com/products" rather than "www.example.com/?q=node/432")
• Multi-level menu system
• Multi-site support^[4]
• Multi-user content creation and editing
• OpenID support
• RSS Feed and Feed Aggregator
• Security/new release update notification
• User profiles
• Various access control restrictions (user roles, IP addresses, email)
• Workflow tools (Triggers and Actions)

Core themes

Drupal core includes several "core themes", which customize the aesthetic look-and-feel of the site. These themes can be chosen by the administrator via a special menu.^[5]

The Color Module, introduced in Drupal core 5.0, allows administrators to change the color scheme of certain themes via a Web-browser interface. This feature was added to allow a higher level of customization for the average non-coder.^[6]

Translations

As of February 2008, translations for Drupal's interface were available in 44 languages plus English (the default).^[7] Some read right to left, such as Arabic, Persian and Hebrew. Drupal 6 provides improved support for content and content administration in multiple languages.^[8]

Auto-update notification

Drupal can automatically notify the administrator when a new version of any module, theme, or the Drupal core itself, becomes available. This feature can help keep a Drupal installation up-to-date with the latest features and security fixes.^[8]

An auto-update module for the older version 5.x provides identical functionality, but it is not included in the core release.^[9]

Notes

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Need an webmaster? Click HERE

Drupal core is designed to be modular with a system of "hooks" and "callbacks", which are accessed internally via an API.^[1] This design allows third-party contributed (often abbreviated to "contrib") modules and themes to extend or override Drupal's default behaviors without changing Drupal core's code.

Drupal's modular design, which isolates Drupal core's files from contributed module and themes, increases flexibility and security and allows Drupal administrators to cleanly upgrade to new releases of Drupal core without potentially overwriting their site's customizations. To maintain this separation, Drupal administrators are instructed to avoid altering Drupal core's software.

Contributed modules

Contributed Drupal modules offer a variety of features including image galleries, custom content types and content listings, WYSIWYG editors, private messaging, 3rd-party integration tools, and more. The Drupal website lists 3709 free modules (as of March 1, 2009), written and contributed to by the Drupal community.^[2][3][4]

• Content Construction Kit (CCK) allows site administrators to dynamically create content types. A content type describes any kind of information to be stored in the website's database. These may include, but are not limited to, events, invitations, reviews, articles, or products.

• Views facilitates the retrieval and presentation of content to site visitors.

The CCK API has been integrated into Drupal as a core module in the unreleased Drupal 7 branch, and Views (without its user interface) will follow at some point in the future.^[5]

Contributed themes

Contributed themes adapt or replace a Drupal site's default look and feel.

Drupal themes use standardized formats that may be generated by common third-party theme design engines. Many themes for Drupal are written in the PHPTemplate engine^[6] or, to a lesser extent, the XTemplate engine.^[7] Some templates use hard-coded PHP.

Although early versions of Drupal's theming system were criticized^[8] for being less design-oriented and more complicated than those for Mambo, Joomla! and Plone, the inclusion of the PHPTemplate and XTemplate engines in Drupal has addressed some of these concerns. The new Drupal 6 theming system utilizes a template engine in an attempt to further separate HTML/CSS from PHP. A new Drupal development module, Devel, provides assistance to theme authors who use Drupal 6.

Community contributed Drupal themes at the Drupal website are released under GPL license (free), and most of them are demonstrated at the Drupal Theme Garden.

Notes

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

• Usability: Some aspects of Drupal's administration interface can be confusing and intimidating, particularly for new administrators.^[1] According to the Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore, Drupal lacks an intuitive, easy administration user interface.^[2][3][4] The administration area is regarded as clunky and cryptic with Drupal version 5 and 6, but improved ease of use is planned with the upcoming version 7. According to Dries Buytaert, Drupal 7 won't be released until 90% of the problems identified by the University of Minnesota^[5][6] and the University of Baltimore^[4] are solved. Usability will be one of the main improvements in Drupal 7 that will close the gap with easier CMSs.^[7]

• Learning curve: Drupal may be powerful, but it is also complex. The key is overcoming its steep initial learning curve.^[1][8][9] Most casual users are willing to sacrifice features for ease of use making Drupal less popular than more user-friendly CMSs despite its enhanced functionality.^[10]

• Backward Compatibility: Drupal is constantly changing and it is a tenet of the design team that backward compatibility be avoided if it hinders new features or even the aesthetics of the code.^[11] Often version changes are not compatible with the previous version. This means that Drupal developers may be required to re-work all of their previous code^[12] However, from an end-user perspective, while the programmatic internals of Drupal may drastically change, Drupal Web sites themselves should be automatically upgraded in newer versions and continue to run seamlessly with minimal administrator involvement.

Notes

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.