Drupal - Overview

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a free and open source Content Management System (CMS) that allows organizing, managing and publishing your content. It is built on PHP based environments. This is carried out under GNU i.e. General Public Licence, that means everyone have a freedom of downloading and sharing it to others.
Drupal is used on million sites such as WhiteHouse.gov, World Economic Forum, Stanford University, Examiner.com and many more.

What is Content Management System?

The Content Management System (CMS) is a software which keeps all the data of your content (such as text, photos, music, documents etc) which will be available on your website. A CMS helps in editing, publishing and modifying the content of the website.

History

The standard release of Drupal known as Drupal core was developed by Dries Buytaerti> in January 2001. It is considered as leading CMS in variety of industries.

Why to use Drupal?

If you are developing a website with content management system, Drupal CMS is very flexible than any other CMS. Drupal is very powerful and can be used for building large, complex sites. It is PHP based template and allows non-technical users to add and edit the content without any HTML or Web design knowledge. Using Drupal CMS, it can be easy to interact with other sites or technologies and can handle complex forms and workflows. It is available with more than 16000 modules which can be addressed with Drupal core and add-on modules.

Features

• It makes easy to create and manage your site.
• Translates anything in the system with built-in user interfaces.
• It connects your website to other sites and services using feeds, search engine connection capabilities etc.
• Drupal is open source software hence requires no licensing costs.
• It designs highly flexible, creative website to the users and display more effectively to increase the visitors.
• Drupal can publish your content on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and other social mediums.
• Drupal provides more number of customizable themes, including several base themes which are used to design your own themes for developing web applications.
• It manages content on informational sites, social media sites, member sites, intranets and web applications.

Advantages

• Drupal is a flexible CMS that allows handling content types including video, text, blog, menu handling, real-time statistics etc.
• It provides a number of templates for developing web applications. So there is no need to start from scratch if you are building simple or complicated web applications.
• Drupal is easy to manage or create blog or website. It helps to organize, structure, find and reuse content.
• Drupal provides some interesting themes and templates which gives your website an attractive look.
• Drupal has over 7000 plug-ins to boost your website. Since Drupal is an open source, you can create your own plug-ins.

Disadvantages

• Drupal is not user friendly interface. It requires advanced knowledge and few basic things about the platform to install and modify.
• Drupal is new content management system. It is not compatible with other software.
• Performance is low compared to other CMS's. The website which is built using Drupal will generate big server loads and never opens with a slow internet connection.

---