Drupal for Not Yet Techies

Drupal is an open source content management platform -- which means that it sets up websites plus manages and controls the content of the website, which makes things a lot easier to change and adjust than a regular website using regular web design and static HTML coding.

Drupal is considered especially good for large websites which are accessed by many people. It allows many different people to access and add content to it.

This is useful for organizational and community web sites.

Drupal's history began in 2000, at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Two students, Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder, set up a wireless bridge between their student dorms to share Hans's ADSL modem.
Then Dries came up with a small news site with a built-in web board. This enabled the friends to leave each other notes and messages.

After graduation, they decided to set the website up online so they could stay in touch. Dries wanted to register the domain name "dorp.org" because dorp is the Dutch work for village. But he typed in drop.org instead.

In January 2001, Dries decided to release the software behind drop.org as "Drupal." Drupal was derived from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word "druppel" which stands for "drop."

So Drupal was intended from its very beginning as software to support a community of users. Tens of thousands of groups have used it.

Drupal is open source software licensed under the GPL. It's maintained and developed by thousands of users and developers.

Basically, Drupal is a set of scripts in PHP. Therefore, it's not as easy for non-techies to use software that comes straight out of the box. If you are a developer, it's extensible so that it can be customized.

Therefore, you need a web server that can handle PHP scripts. Apache is considered the ideal server for Drupal, but Microsoft's IIS can work as well.

You need a database. It works with MySQL, MySQLi and PostgreSQL.

Content and presentation are kept separate. This means that you can change the look of the pages of your site without changing the content.

Durpal currently supports built-in taxonomy. That means you can use free tagging of your content pages to organize by subject, much as technorati.com and delicio.us do.

It also uses Categories to organize content.

• book
• comment
• contact
• drupal
• forum
• legacy
• node
• page
• path
• poll
• profile
• search
• statistics
• taxonomy
• throttle
• tracker
• upload

And it uses the following contributed modules:

• codefilter
• cvslog
• feature
• image
• porter-stemmer
• project
• urlfilter
• simplenews

There're also:

There're also several custom php pages:

• handbook
• code
• blocks

Plus a built-in RSS reader and feed aggregator.

Drupal can also be used just for personal blogging, and provides for trackbacks, comments and automatic pinging.

However, if all you want to do is blog, Drupal is probably unnecessary -- just use Wordpress.

I have seen some people intending to use Drupal simply as a web site builder. This may make sense if you intend to travel, and want to add to your web site from Internet cafes, since Drupal does support remote access. Or if you plan to have many different employees or associates adding content, especially from separate locations.

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