Working with Drupal Innovation
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Wikipedia
Drupal (/ˈdruːpəl/) is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide and 1.2% of the top 10 million websites—ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites. Systems also use Drupal for knowledge management and for business collaboration.
As of March 2022, the Drupal community had more than 1.39 million members, including 124,000 users actively contributing, resulting in more than 48,300 free modules that extend and customize Drupal functionality, over 3,000 free themes that change the look and feel of Drupal, and at least 1,400 free distributions that allow users to quickly and easily set up a complex, use-specific Drupal in fewer steps.
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, taxonomy, page layout customization, and system administration. The Drupal core installation can serve as a simple website, a single- or multi-user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for user-generated content.
Drupal also describes itself as a Web application framework. When compared with notable frameworks, Drupal meets most of the generally accepted feature requirements for such web frameworks.
Although Drupal offers a sophisticated API for developers, basic Web-site installation and administration of the framework require no programming skills.
Drupal runs on any computing platform that supports both a web server capable of running PHP and a database to store content and configuration.
Drupal was originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board for his friends to communicate in their dorms while working on his Master’s degree at the University of Antwerp. After graduation, Buytaert moved the site to the public internet and named it Drop.org.
The name Drupal represents an English rendering of the Dutch word druppel, which means “drop” (as in a water droplet). The name came from the now-defunct Drop.org, whose code slowly evolved into Drupal. Buytaert wanted to call the site “dorp” (Dutch for “village”) for its community aspects, but mistyped it when checking the domain name and thought the error sounded better.
Drupal became an open source project in 2001. Interest in Drupal got a significant boost in 2003 when it helped build “DeanSpace” for Howard Dean, one of the candidates in the U.S. Democratic Party’s primary campaign for the 2004 U.S. presidential election. DeanSpace used open-source sharing of Drupal to support a decentralized network of approximately 50 disparate, unofficial pro-Dean websites that allowed users to communicate directly with one another as well as with the campaign. After Dean ended his campaign, members of his Web team continued to pursue their interest in developing a Web platform that could aid political activism by launching CivicSpace Labs in July 2004, “…the first company with full-time employees that was developing and distributing Drupal technology.” Other companies began to also specialize in Drupal development. By 2013 the Drupal website listed hundreds of vendors that offered Drupal-related services.
As of 2014, Drupal is developed by a community. From July 2007 to June 2008, the Drupal.org site provided more than 1.4 million downloads of Drupal software, an increase of approximately 125% from the previous year.
As of January 2017 more than 1,180,000 sites use Drupal. These include hundreds of well-known organizations, including corporations, media and publishing companies, governments, non-profits, schools, and individuals. Drupal has won several Packt Open Source CMS Awards and won the Webware 100 three times in a row.
Drupal 6 was released on February 13, 2008, on March 5, 2009, Buytaert announced a code freeze for Drupal 7 for September 1, 2009. Drupal 7 was released on January 5, 2011, with release parties in several countries. After that, maintenance on Drupal 5 stopped, with only Drupal 7 and Drupal 6 maintained. Drupal 7’s end-of-life was scheduled for November 2021, but given the impact of COVID-19, and the continuing wide usage, the end of life has been pushed back until November 1, 2023, to be reviewed annually.
On October 7, 2015, Drupal 8 first release candidate (rc1) was announced. Drupal 8 includes new features and improvements for both users and developers, including: a revamped user interface; WYSIWYG and in-place editing; improved mobile support; added and improved key contributed modules including Views, Date, and Entity Reference; introduced a new object-oriented backend leveraging Symfony components; revamped configuration management; and improved multilingual support. Drupal 8 rc1 is the collective work of over 3,200 core contributors. Drupal 8 only allows clients to use local images and utilizes only filtered HTML designs.
In the Drupal community, “core” refers to the collaboratively built codebase that can be extended through contributory modules and—for versions prior to Drupal 8—is kept outside of the “sites” folder of a Drupal installation. (Starting with version 8, core is kept in its own ‘core’ sub-directory.) Drupal core is the stock element of Drupal. Common Drupal-specific libraries, as well as the bootstrap process, are defined as Drupal core; all other functionality is defined as Drupal modules including the system module itself.
In a Drupal website’s default configuration, authors can contribute content as either registered or anonymous users (at the discretion of the administrator). This content is accessible to web visitors through a variety of selectable criteria. As of Drupal 8, Drupal has adopted some Symfony libraries into Drupal core.
Core modules also includes a hierarchical taxonomy system, which lets developers categorize content or tagged with key words for easier access.
Drupal maintains a detailed changelog of core feature updates by version.