Why We Love Drupal

Submitted by Jon Lebkowsky on .

Drupal is the premiere open source Content Management System (CMS) available today. Drupal features an amazing collection of features allowing any type of site. Whether your site is a blog, brochure company site, full blown social community, ecommerce shopping site, or an informational site for an organization Drupal is the right tool for the job. 

Check out some cool huge sites:

The key features of Drupal are:

  • Scalability: Drupal can be used by small blogger type websites to huge Social Networking sites as well as e-commerce for shopping carts and purchases
  • Huge network of users world wide: Drupal has been around for 8 years and has achieved wide acceptance from thousands of developers. Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal, has also founded two private companies, Acquia and Mollom. Both of which provide commercial services and products in support of Drupal including 24/7 engineering phone support.
  • Open Source: Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL (“GNU General Public License”) and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. Drupal source-code is readily available and not locked down in some company’s vault. If you want to make a change, you can always hire a programmer and make a change
  • Search engine Optimized: Drupal can generate meaningful titles for pages to make them more relevant to search engines Drupal pages are generated on the fly from a database including the front page which makes them more appealing to search engines. There are search engine modules available for improving your chances of getting found.
  • Widely supported by many developers: Many thousands of developers are contributing to Drupal’s core (the main code that makes up Drupal) There are about 3000 (and growing) modules that have been contributed by the Drupal community which extend Drupal’s functionality. Chances are that you can use one of them rather than having to custom code a module for your needs.
  • Stable and robust: Drupal runs reliably and predictably all over the web There are many security measures to protect websites from users posting spam and code that could otherwise exploit vulnerabilities in websites A security team posts security patches when security breaches are identified and they can be applied to sites easily and quickly
  • Extensible and configurable: Drupal has an extensible architecture which has allowed for the 3000 modules that have been posted to the drupal.org website. Drupal can be made to look any way you like it with full integration of current web 2.0 technologies including AJAX, AHAH, Javascript, Flash etc.
  • High Performance: Drupal can be configured to provide very high performance for high traffic websites Drupal has efficient caching capabilities and can be configured to run on multiple servers for effective load-balancing
  • Low cost: Drupal is free! It can be downloaded with full source-code from www.drupal.org
  • International: Drupal has internationalization and can be made to show content in multiple languages even right to left languages like Hebrew.

Some of the features of Drupal Drupal is ready to go from the moment you download it. It even has an easy-to-use web installer! The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

  • Content Management Systems
  • Blogs
  • Collaborative authoring environments
  • Forums
  • Peer-to-peer networking
  • Newsletters
  • Podcasting
  • Picture galleries
  • File uploads and downloads and much more.

Drupal has won many awards including:

  • Congratulations to Drupal for winning a CNET Webware 100 award in the publishing category.
    • The 2008 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, CNET’s editors selected 300 finalists. But the Web’s users decided the final cut, voting nearly two million times to select the 100 top products–10 each in of 10 categories–from our list of 300 finalists. We hope that the Drupal community is excited about being selected by your users. And we congratulate the Drupal community on offering a great Web service.
  • Drupal Revealed as the Winner of the Overall Open Source CMS Award – 2008 Friday October 31
    • Packt is pleased to reveal Drupal as the winner of the 2008 Overall Open Source CMS Award. Drupal retains the Award for the first time and collects the first prize of $5,000. Finishing in first runner up position is 2006 winner Joomla! who receives $3,000 ahead of DotNetNuke who receive $2,000. Full details of the 2008 Overall Open Source CMS Award result. Drupal Revealed as the Winner of the Overall Open Source CMS Award – 2007 After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, Drupal succeeds Joomla! as the overall winner and receives a cheque for $5,000. CNET webware 100 winner – April 2008 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13546_109-9913290-29.html

Drupal is a powerful publishing and content management system. Users can add all sorts of content to Web pages through a system of modules. The software itself is free and open-source; users need simply pick out which site elements they want, and then put them together. Drupal has been used on several popular and professional sites. One of the most notable is The Onion, the satirical news publication, as well as MTV’s Web site in the United Kingdom. In its latest iteration, version 6, it has added support for drag-and-drop, OpenID logins, and an editor that can be tuned to suit both left, and right viewing cultures.