Presentation: What is Drupal?
In this presentation, I’ll show what Drupal is used for and where it is already being applied:
Drupal is a free CMS with open-source code that allows easy organization, management, and publishing of content with endless customization options.
Dries Buytaert began developing Drupal as a message board in 1999. Within a year, more and more people became interested in using Drupal, so the project was made open source. Drupal.org appeared online in 2001, and the Drupal community gained momentum by 2005 with several conferences.
Drupal is supported and developed by a community of over 630,000 users and developers. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License (or "GPL"), which means anyone can freely download and share it with others. Today, Drupal is used by everyone from small entrepreneurs to global corporations. In Russia, well-known sites like Sportbox and Lib.rus.ec are also built on Drupal CMS.
Moreover, Drupal is a cutting-edge platform that supports the latest technologies on the web. The project’s principles encourage modularity, standards, collaboration, ease of use, and much more.
Key advantages of Drupal include:
1) Versatility. Enables implementation of most web programming tasks.
2) Reliability and stability. Drupal has a modular core developed by top developers from around the world.
3) Scalability and flexibility. Drupal can be used for any project — from a small business card site to a news portal.
4) Functionality. Numerous Drupal modules and the ability to write your own applications greatly extend functionality.
5) Documented API. Easy integration with various applications.
Is it difficult to build a site on Drupal? If you're talking about a corporate landing page, a small online store, an information portal, or a personal blog — it's simple. You can learn how in just a few hours without knowledge of databases, layout, or programming. Thousands of websites across Russia are created by office managers, gym workers, beauty salon employees, and travel agents.
Drupal is primarily oriented toward the LAMP platform:
Linux — operating system;
Apache — web server;
MySQL — database system;
PHP — programming language.
Other system software options are also supported:
Operating Systems: Unix family (including FreeBSD, Mac OS X), Windows;
Web Servers: Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, IIS Versions 6, 7;
Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL;
PHP 5.2.4 and higher.
Drupal is not only a CMS but also a CMF (Content Management Framework).
The Drupal core includes essential features like blogs, forums, and contact forms and can be easily extended by downloading additional modules and themes.
Drupal supports interface localization in more than 100 languages (though not all translations are complete). Russian language support is available. Drupal uses its own localization mechanism that stores translations in the database along with other site content. Translations can be imported and exported as .po files (gettext library format).
Full content localization is supported by additional modules that aren’t included in the Drupal package but can be downloaded from the developer's website.
The Drupal administration panel is divided into five main sections: content, appearance, users, structure, and configuration. Additional modules will expand the options within these sections. You can easily manage key site configuration settings like changing the site slogan, default language, and date/time settings, creating custom RSS feeds, and more. Once your site is fully configured and ready for content, you can set up and place blocks, create menus, change the theme, and add different content types.
A site can have an unlimited number of installed themes, allowing users to select a personal or even a mobile version of the theme.
You can classify content using taxonomy, menus, "featured content" blocks to highlight key information, automatically generated human-readable URLs, and many other Drupal features.
What can I build with Drupal:
- Blogs;
- Corporate and intranet websites;
- Photo and video galleries;
- Forums;
- Online stores;
- Educational portals;
- Social networks;
- Contests;
- News portals;
- Wiki sites;
- Web services.
Where and by whom Drupal is used:
- Media;
- Non-profit organizations;
- Education;
- Software companies;
- Politics;
- Entertainment;
- Healthcare;
- Magazines;
- Broadcasting;
- News portals;
- Government entities.