Drupal

= libre content management system for the Web

URL = http://drupal.org.

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).

Drupal Release History

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]]