White paper on Drupal developer

White paper on Drupal developer

COURTESY :- vrindawan.in

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 Buy taert 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, Buy aert 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 “Dean Space” for Howard Dean, one of the candidates in the U.S. Democratic Party’s primary campaign for the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Dean Space 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 Civic Space 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 Web ware 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 back end 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 October 2022, Drupal released an open source headless CMS accelerator, allowing the front end to be managed outside of the core system.

In the Drupal community, “core” refers to the collaboratively built code base 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 select able 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 change log of core feature updates by version.

Drupal core includes modules that can be enabled by the administrator to extend the functionality of the core website.

The core Drupal distribution provides a number of features, including:

Drupal includes core themes, which customize the “look and feel” of Drupal sites, for example, Garland and Bartik.

The Color Module, introduced in Drupal core 5.0, allows administrators to change the color scheme of certain themes via a browser interface.

As of September 2022, Drupal is available in 100 languages including English (the default). Support is included for right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew.

Drupal localization is built on top of get text, the GNU internationalization and localization (i18n) library.

Drupal can automatically notify the administrator about new versions of modules, themes, or the Drupal core. It’s important to update quickly after security updates are released.

Before updating it is highly recommended to take backup of core, modules, theme, files and database. If there is any error shown after update or if the new update is not compatible with a module, then it can be quickly replaced by backup. There are several backup modules available in Drupal.

On 15 October 2014, an SQL injection vulnerability was announced and update released. Two weeks later the Drupal security team released an advisory explaining that everyone should act under the assumption that any site not updated within 7 hours of the announcement were compromised by automated attacks. Thus, it can be extremely important to apply these updates quickly and usage of a tool like drush to make this process easier is highly recommended.

Prior to version 7, Drupal had functions that performed tasks related to databases, such as SQL query cleansing, multi-site table name prefixing, and generating proper SQL queries. In particular, Drupal 6 introduced an abstraction layer that allowed programmers to create SQL queries without writing SQL.

Drupal 9 extends the data abstraction layer so that a programmer no longer needs to write SQL queries as text strings. It uses PHP Data Objects to abstract the database. Microsoft has written a database driver for their SQL Server. Drupal 7 supports the file-based SQLite database engine, which is part of the standard PHP distribution.