What is Drupal?
Drupal is a flexible and popular Open Source CMS, which is freely available to download, and which has been around since 2001. It has been used as a web framework for many different types of web sites, ranging from personal blogs to large scale corporate and political sites.
Although all CMSs facilitate the development of web content, one of the reasons for Drupal's popularity is that Drupal has taken such development a step further than most. In Drupal, the Drupal framework itself can be changed and developed. Such openness means that Drupal is highly flexible, and that it can be tailored to produce web sites that precisely meet with requirements.
Another reason for Drupal's popularity is that the core Drupal framework can be augmented with one (or more) from amongst many thousands of community developed (and peer tested) plug-in widgets, called modules. These provide the core Drupal framework with addition functionality, and further enhance Drupal's reputation as a flexible CMS.
Drupal goes presidential
Cast your mind back to 2008 and 2009. Drupal was the CMS that was used to underpin one of the game-changing web sites developed for the Obama presidential campaign. That web site supported both interactive promotions and social media, along with the processing of on-line campaign donations. Irrespective of political perspective, the web site demonstrated the power of the web. It also demonstrated several important CMS attributes, and four key CMS attributes.
Key CMS Attributes
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It is the S in CMS that is essential. The S stands for system, but it should stand for speed. Speed (or efficiency) is the key benefit that can be derived from CMS use. Benefits primarily arise from the inclusion within CMSs of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editors and related functionality. Such editors are simple to use and can be accessed by a range of users across the web, and allow anyone with Microsoft Word experience to create web content. Consequently, CMSs provide non-programmers with the opportunity to create content which traditionally had been the preserve of web developers.
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In addition, CMSs facilitate the generation of a range of distinct "user roles", with particular access rights and permissions. These roles ensure that a CMS web site is responsive to user needs.
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Generally a CMS will store content in a database, allowing content to be reused in multiple formats and on multiple web pages reducing the amount of time required to develop web content.
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Most CMSs facilitate a separation between the back end database (and associated programming), and the front-end design. This specialisation and efficiency also allows for the modularisation of the CMS.
