Drupal: Open source Content Management

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.

According to wikipedia: Drupal is a free and open-source content management framework (CMF) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 2.1% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.

Standard Release and its Features.

The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to content management systems. These include user account registration and maintenance, menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration. The Drupal core installation can be used as a brochureware website, a single- or multi user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for user-generated content.

Drupal Core's main feature includes:

• Access statistics and logging
• Advanced search
• Blogs, books, comments, forums, and polls
• Caching and feature throttling for improved performance
• Descriptive URLs
• Multi-level menu system
• Multi-site support
• Multi-user content creation and editing
• OpenID support
• RSS feed and feed aggregator
• Security and new release update notification
• User profiles
• Various access control restrictions (user roles, IP addresses, email)
• Workflow tools (triggers and actions)

Drupal is now developed by a community, and its popularity is growing rapidly. From July 2007 to June 2008, Drupal was downloaded from the Drupal.org website more than 1.4 million times, an increase of approximately 125% from the previous year. As of December 2012, more than 808 000 sites are using Drupal. These include hundreds of well-known organizations, including corporations, media & publishing companies, governments, non-profits, schools, and individuals. Drupal also won several Packt Open Source CMS Awards and won the Webware 100 three times in a row.

                          

Future of Drupal

Drupal is playing an important role beyond its traditional base of small companies, government and non-profit organizations. It has also hit — and hit hard — with the larger organizations of the world. Drupal growth is clear, along with the disruption it is causing for Enterprise CMS. That could be one of the reasons for the growth in its activity.

                             

                                  

         

Conclusion

Drupal’s growth is steady, well-sustained and on the right track to continue disrupting the small, medium and Enterprise CMS world, its future is potentially bright to a good extent.

                                   

The Drupal mantra, “Come for the software, stay for the community,” is really true in all senses. Once you join a Drupal camp or conference you can really see what is underneath that software — an unbelievable ecosystem.

Startups, small and medium companies deploying a few or several sites using Drupal are excellent situations for this platform success. Large deployments of Drupal sites by global corporations, up to hundreds of websites for a single company, are the key to bringing Drupal to the next level and establishing it, once and for all, as the leader in the enterprise world. Future is RestFull. Future is Bright.