DRUPAL

'Drupal' (IPA pronunciation: ) is a free and open source modular content management system (CMS) written in the programming language PHP. A CMS is a tool used by Web administrators to automatically track online visitors and prepare customized content for consumption, usually as HTML-based Web pages. Many modern CMSs, including Drupal, provide a "back end" interface by which the system administrator may customize the content and display of their Web site without any programming skill being required.
Drupal runs in many environments including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or any platform that supports either the Apache (version 1.3+), or IIS (version IIS5+) Web server as well as the PHP language (version 4.3.3+). As Drupal requires a database to store content and settings, access to a database package such as MySQL or PostgreSQL is also necessary. Detailed requirements are available at Drupal's Web Site.
As of July 26, 2007, the current version of Drupal is 5.2.^[1] Version 6.0 has reached a "feature freeze" and is currently in active development.

Contents

History

Drupal's Design

Modules

System Version Tracking

Themes

Translations

Criticism

Distributions

Books

References

See also

External links

History

Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a bulletin board system, Drupal became an open source project in 2001. ''Drupal'' is an English transliteration of the Dutch word “,” which means “drop” (as in “a water droplet”). 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.^[2]
Over the years, Drupal has gained popularity. From May 2006 to April 2007, Drupal was downloaded from the Drupal.org website more than 600,000 times.^[3] A large community now takes part in Drupal's ongoing development.^[4]

Drupal's Design

Drupal has received praise from Web administrators, designers, and programmers due in part to its modular design, which allows its basic layer, or "core", to provide essential features in its default configuration. Additional functionality and presentation can then be extended to the core via the addition of pluggable modules and themes.^[5].
Drupal modules can be used to "override" the core's built-in features, thus extending or even replacing Drupal's default behavior without directly manipulating the programmed code in Drupal's core files. This ability to modify core functionality has major consequences for Drupal's flexibility as well as its security, particularly against security problems like SQL injection.
Similarly, Drupal uses a modular theming system that allows custom-written themes to be added without disturbing Drupal's core. These custom themes use standardized formats that provide compatibility with third-party theme design engines.

Modules

Core Drupal provides its own modules. However, community-written modules can be downloaded and installed into a non-core area of Drupal's installation. The Drupal core has been designed with a system of hooks, or callbacks, that allow community-contributed modules to insert functions into Drupal's path of execution.
Modules included in Drupal's core enable users to:

★ Post, revise, and categorize content

★ Conduct searches

★ Post comments

★ Take part in forums

★ Vote in polls

★ Work on collaborative writing projects

★ Post and view personal profiles

★ Communicate among themselves or with the managers of a site

★ Change the look of a site with off-the-shelf or custom-made themes

★ Build multi-level menus

★ Provide users with an interface in their local language

★ Provide RSS feeds

★ Gather content from the RSS feeds of other sites

★ Register and manage user accounts

★ Assign fine-grained user roles, granting users permission to use selected features of a site

★ Use access rules to deny site access to specified usernames, e-mail addresses, and IP addresses

★ Provide statistics and reports for administrators

★ Manage caching and throttling to improve how a site performs in heavy traffic

★ Construct and specify various input filters and content types

★ Generate user-friendly, easy-to-remember URLs (for example, "www.mysite.com/products" rather than "www.mysite.com/?q=node/432)
Additionally, the Drupal website provides many hundreds of free modules written by the Drupal community. Among the functionality user-contributed modules provides or enhances:

★ e-commerce systems

★ Workflow features

★ Photo galleries

★ Organic groups

★ Google sitemaps

★ Amazon Items^[6]

★ Mailing list management

★ Integration with CVS

System Version Tracking

'update_status', a relatively new module available for 5.x (and being introduced as part of core in 6.0) automatically notifies the administrator of any new releases to installed modules and themes.

Themes

Most themes for Drupal are written in the PHPTemplate engine^[7] or the XTemplate engine^[8]. Earlier templates used hard-coded PHP.
Earlier versions of Drupal's theming system were criticized ^[9] as being less design-oriented and more complicated than the systems for Mambo and Plone. The inclusion of the PHPTemplate and XTemplate engines in Drupal has addressed some of these criticisms.

Translations

As of August 2007, translations for Drupal's interface were available in 37 languages other than English (the default).^[10] Supported languages include some that read right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Criticism

The installation of Drupal (and its modules) requires access to a database as well as certain high-level privileges, including the ability to use SQL commands such as SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, and LOCK TABLES. Some Web hosting providers, however, do not offer these features. Anyone who wishes to use Drupal should ensure that their host offers these features before they begin installation.
As with other content management systems, one can set up the initial database by using the command line[1] or with phpMyAdmin/PhpPgAdmin. But since version 5.0, one can install Drupal and set up the database almost entirely from a Web-based interface.
Some^[11] have considered Drupal more difficult to learn and slightly more difficult to install than some simple CMS programs or basic blogging tools such as WordPress. Drupal 5.0, released January 15, 2007, is packaged with a Web-based installer to partly answer these criticisms, and Drupal 6.0, which may be released in September of 2007, goes even further in making installation simpler.^[12]
Some programmers criticize Drupal because they perceive it as not being OOP, but Drupal programming from an object-oriented perspective explains how OOP and AOP principles apply to Drupal.

Distributions

To simplify the installation process for those who would like to use Drupal for a specific purpose (an online store, a music review site, a blogging site, etc.), there has been discussion in the Drupal community to distribute "pre-made" Drupal installations that are pre-customized with third party modules and configured towards a particular type of Web site.
There are several customized Drupal distributions already. Most are simply Drupal repackaged with third-party modules, but some also include modifications to the core.
An example of such a distribution is vbDrupal, which is Drupal integrated with vBulletin.
Drupal 4.2 ^[13] was used for DeanSpace, which hosted many independent Web sites supporting the 2004 presidential campaign of Howard Dean. After the Dean campaign ended, the DeanSpace project grew into CivicSpace, a Drupal-based "grassroots organizing platform that empowers collective action inside communities and cohesively connects remote groups of supporters." Thus CivicSpace is a spinoff distribution based on Drupal 4.2.
Many innovations in CivicSpace have been incorporated back into the Drupal project itself^[14]. Features particularly useful for nonprofit organizations and political campaigns are provided in the CiviCRM module for Drupal 5.0 and higher.

Books

Drupal has been discussed in several books:

★ ''Pro Drupal Development'' (April 2007) by John K. VanDyk and Matt Westgate (ISBN 1590597559)

★ ''Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, And Community Websites'' by David Mercer (ISBN 1904811809)

★ ''Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress'' by Robert T. Douglass, Mike Little, and Jared W. Smith (ISBN 1590595629)

★ '' by Joe Trippi (ISBN 0-06-076155-5)

★ ''The power of many: how the living web is transforming politics, business, and everyday life'' by Christian Crumlish (ISBN 0782143466)

★ '' by Dan Gillmor (ISBN 0-596-00733-7)

★ ''Drupal. Community-Websites entwickeln und verwalten mit dem Open Source-CMS. (German)'' by Hagen Graf (ISBN 3827323215)

References

1. Security updates and bugfixes available: Drupal 5.2 and 4.7.7 released
2. http://drupal.org/node/769
3. "Drupal Download Statistics," http://buytaert.net/tag/statistics
4. "Growth Graphs," http://groups.drupal.org/node/1980
5. (The features of Drupal's core are described in the online "Drupal Handbook" beginning at http://drupal.org/handbook/modules.
6. Amazon Items
7. "PHPTemplate theme engine", Drupal.org.
8. "XTemplate theme engine", Drupal.org.
9. "How does Drupal compare to Mambo?" discussion thread, Drupal.org.
10. "Translations," Drupal.org http://drupal.org/project/Translations (retrieved 12 August 2007)
11. Alister Lewis-Bowen et al., "Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site," IBM, July 11, 2006.
12. Drupal 5.0 Feature List January 15, 2007. Accessed January 15, 2007.
13. http://drupal.org/node/4877#comment-7552
14. CivicSpace

See also

★ List of content management systems

External links

★ Drupal website

★ Documentation for developers

★ Drupal Cookbook (for New Drupallers)

★ Drupal Association