Revision as of 14:40, 19 November 2017

= libre content management system for the Web

Definition

Drupal is an Open Source web application. It is commonly described as a content management system. Drupal is designed for use as a web application, destined for installation on a web server. Drupal can be installed in a LAMP, the most commonly available web hosting environment.

Description

David Rozas:

"Drupal is a FLOSS content management framework: a software designed to build dynamic websites, web applications, web resources and web services, providing a set of common functionalities that can be adapted and extended (Docforge.com, n.d.). It is based on the programming language PHP14 and the source code is licensed under a GPL license." (https://davidrozas.cc/sites/default/files/publications/files/phd_thesis_drupal_cbpp_pre_viva.pdf)

Status

"Drupal’s main collaboration platform offers a large pool of more than 20,000

modules and nearly 2,500 themes under a GPL license." [1]

Drupal's user community is well developed and widely varied. While the site at http://drupal.org is primarily in English it is possible to find a great many user groups and companies on and offline that develop, share, re-use, or otherwise take part in the global community. One site to find groups specific to countries is http://groups.drupal.org , a Drupal project website that allows users to form groups around specific areas of interest.

History

Drupal's continued development is underwritten as a labor of love with a bit of a tendency for benevolent world domination. By his own account the project founder was simply to help a group of college students communicate. As developers and collaborators joined in to aid Dries the project grew by leaps and bounds, fits and starts, until the community of users and developers was large enough to begin having regular conferences. A Foundation was created to steward some aspects of the future of the project, responsibilities like insuring that the project hosting was sufficiently well managed, as well as raising funds for the development of specific functionality (and that only when necessary).

2.2 Key moments in the history of Drupal and its community

David Rozas:

Origin of Drupal and launching of Drupal.org

"The history of the Drupal project began in 1998 at the University of Antwerp (Dolin, 2011, p. 822). Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder, two undergraduate students, decided to set up a wireless bridge to share Hans’ ADSL27 connection between them and other students (Drupal.org, n.d.-e). Dries started the development of a messaging board system accessible through the Local Area Network28 to exchange messages and news between dorm-mates (Dolin, 2011, p. 822). Dries designed this system as a small content management framework, which would be the origin of Drupal.

After graduating in Computer Science, Dries decided to launch the site online in order to continue using the system after leaving university. A small community had already gathered around the site, and he decided to look for a domain which captured the essence of this community spirit. He thought of the domain “dorp.org”, an abbreviation of the Dutch word “dorpje” for village that also has communitarian connotations. Nevertheless, he mistyped it and wrote “drop.org”. Realising that the domain was available, Dries decided to reserve this domain instead and use it for the site that was launched online in April 2000.

On the 15th January 2001 Dries released the source code that powered “drop.org” under a GNU General Public License (Drupal.org, 2011g). This was the first FLOSS version: Drupal 1.0. The name was chosen as a back-translation of the word “drop” into Dutch: “druppel”. The word “druppel” is pronounced phonetically as “droo-puhl”, and he then spelt it in English as “drupal” (Dolin, 2011; Drupal.org, n.d.-e). These origins of Drupal are to be contextualised within a period in which large and complex websites still tended to rely on proprietary CMSs (Stephens, 2008; CMSReview.com, n.d.), such as Vignette (CMSMatrix.org, n.d.), and when FLOSS CMSs, such as PHP-Nuke (Paterson, 2005) and TYPO3 (Typo3.com, n.d.), began to be technically mature and more widely used.

Although the original purpose of “drop.org” was to act as a web board and news site for general discussions, the technology powering the platform in itself, Drupal, became one of the most popular topics on the site after being released as FLOSS. Two months later, Dries launched a new version of Drupal, 2.0, and decided to create a specific site for the discussions around it due to the increasing interest in the software: “drupal.org”.

This site was the initial point for users to gather and extend the Drupal community globally, becoming and remaining the main collaboration platform for the project. The site would be extended and modified over time to include various tools to facilitate collaboration in the community, such as groups, forums, issues lists for projects or wikis to write documentation. The growth experienced by the community over the following years would be reflected in the growth of activity on the site. What started as a basic site for discussion , now (11/02/2017) has nearly 1.3 million users registered, of which more than 105,000 are considered active contributors30, and more than 6.5 million comments and issues (Drupal.org, n.d.-d), providing but a few indicators of the growth of activity on the platform." (https://davidrozas.cc/sites/default/files/publications/files/phd_thesis_drupal_cbpp_pre_viva.pdf)

Discussion

P2P and Drupal

Drupal itself is only a piece of software. It's like a shovel in the sense that it can be used for a number of purposes, and it lends itself really well to one particular purpose. The Drupal community is a teeming frothy pool of interaction and peer support, and the bulk of the traffic on the website is related to finding bugs, fixing them, asking for help about how to fix them, or planning new features for future development. The Drupal Groups site is where collections of users converse about sets of features and plan events together. For a fun insight you can take a look at the events page at http://groups.drupal.org/events. You can see that there are between 1-10 events planned almost every day for the next couple of months. It's an active community, and all of those events are produced by Drupal users looking to reach out to other Drupal users. They need no permission to offer an event.

The active community has fostered the development of a number of resources for new users, creating an "on ramp" allowing new users to gear up to Drupal and achieve competence quickly.

More Information

Social Publishing with Drupal

[[Category::Free Software]]

Drupal: Difference between revisions