Drupal is the most popular open source CMS on the market today, which essentially means that it is developed by volunteers who leave the freely available source code. Drupal is used daily by many people and communities to manage their Web sites.

That’s because you can make a very diverse range of Web applications:

- Institutional sites (the universities of Harvard, the Government of Belgium, some sites NASA)

- Portals and community of any size (Amnesty International)

- Intranet sites

- Blog, blog multiuser (blog of Tim Berners-Lee)

- Directory content (MTV)

- E-commerce (Warner Brothers Records)

- Digg.com clones, emulates the youtube and flickr.

- If Drupal was found the optimal choice for these Web sites, is also likely to meet our needs. With this guide we put the foundation to deepen their knowledge of Drupal and realize what we have in mind.

Why use Drupal

Drupal is a CMS Open Source more efficient and flexible available. With the latest versions 6.x, have improved many things, such as the installation: if the first change was necessary to hand the configuration files, now you can easily install everything, with a wizard, directly online.

Significant improvements were made through careful analysis of usability and the consequent improvement of the administration, which now has advanced controls that allow us, for example, to design the layout of the blocks through drag and drop.

The community, which has made it possible to achieve these results, counts a number of developers, testers and users, providing constantly new ideas and products – often for free – in order to achieve the most varied features.

Ultimately Drupal offers stability, security and performance, and apparently has worked very well on ease of use.

History

Drupal’s history began in 2000 between the desks of the University of Antwer. At the university did not provide free access to the Internet for students, so Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder decided to install a wireless router to connect ADSL to share the connection.

However, there was no system for sharing files and information, so Dries created a small interactive site that allowed students to send notes and useful to everyone. After university, the group of students decided to publish the site on the Internet, so that they could continue to communicate, so drop.org was born.

Once published on the Web, users of the site increased and members began talking about authentication, moderation, rating, as syndication and implement them on the site.

In 2001 Dries decided to release the software behind drop.org with the name of Drupal and open source license to allow others to use and extend the system.

Drupal CMS is a very powerful, but also a project that size and complexity, can intimidate the beginning. Following through and through the main theme of this guide to learn some ‘entire infrastructure, a Web site. Above all, remember that the experience is the greatest teacher: The more time passes trying to set up the site, the more we go between the secrets of Drupal and they include power and flexibility.

Drupal awarded 2008 Best CMS