Drupal: Difference between revisions

Drupal
	Home page of a default Drupal installation (with a Lorem Ipsum article).
Stable release	5.3 / October 17, 2007
Repository	git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal.git ;
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Content management framework, Content management system, Community and Blog software
License	GPL
Website	http://drupal.org

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Revision as of 17:23, 22 November 2007

Drupal (Template:PronEng) is a free and open source modular content management system (CMS) written in the programming language PHP. A CMS is a tool used by Web administrators to automatically track online visitors and prepare customized content for consumption, usually as HTML-based Web pages. Drupal, like many modern CMSs, allows the system administrator to customize the content and display of the Web site with little or no programming.

Drupal runs in many environments, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and any platform that supports either the Apache (version 1.3+), or IIS (version IIS5+) Web server and the PHP language (version 4.3.3+). Drupal requires a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL to store content and settings. (Requirements are available at Drupal's web site).

As of October 17, 2007, the current version of Drupal is 5.3.^[1] The third beta release of Version 6.0, which has reached "feature freeze," occurred on November 21, 2007.

History

Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a bulletin board system, Drupal became an open source project in 2001. Drupal is an English transliteration of the Dutch word “druppel,” which means “drop” (as in “a water droplet”). The name was taken from the now-defunct Drop.org website, whose code slowly evolved into Drupal. Buytaert wanted to call the site “dorp” (Dutch for “village”, referring to its community aspects), but made a typo when checking the domain name and thought it sounded better.^[2]

From May 2006 to April 2007, Drupal was downloaded from the Drupal.org website more than 600,000 times.^[3] A large community now helps develop Drupal.^[4]

Design

Web administrators, designers, and programmers have praised Drupal's modular design, which allows its basic layer, or "core", to provide essential features in its default configuration. Functions and presentation can be added through pluggable modules and themes.^[5].

Drupal modules can "override" the core's built-in features, extending or even replacing Drupal's default behavior without directly manipulating the programmed code in Drupal's core files. This increases flexibility and security, and helps defeat SQL injection.

Custom themes, which can be added without disturbing Drupal's core, use standardized formats that can be generated by third-party theme design engines.

Modules

The Drupal core has been designed with a system of hooks, or callbacks, that allow modules to insert functions into Drupal's path of execution.

Modules included in Drupal's core enable users to:

Post, revise, and categorize content
Conduct searches
Post comments
Take part in forums
Vote in polls
Work on collaborative writing projects
Post and view personal profiles
Communicate among themselves or with the managers of a site
Change the look of a site with off-the-shelf or custom-made themes
Build multi-level menus
Provide users with an interface in their local language
Provide RSS feeds
Gather content from the RSS feeds of other sites
Register and manage user accounts
Assign fine-grained user roles, granting users permission to use selected features of a site
Use access rules to deny site access to specified usernames, e-mail addresses, and IP addresses
Provide statistics and reports for administrators
Manage caching and throttling to improve how a site performs in heavy traffic
Construct and specify various input filters and content types
Generate user-friendly, easy-to-remember URLs (for example, "www.mysite.com/products" rather than "www.mysite.com/?q=node/432)

The Drupal website provides hundreds of free modules written by the Drupal community, which provide:

e-commerce systems
Workflow features
Photo galleries
Organic groups
Google sitemaps
Amazon Items^[6]
Mailing list management
A Constituent Relationship Managment (CRM) System, CiviCRM
Integration with CVS

System version tracking

update_status, a relatively new module available for 5.x (and being introduced as part of core in 6.0) automatically notifies the administrator of any new releases to installed modules and themes.

Themes

Most themes for Drupal are written in the PHPTemplate engine^[7] or the XTemplate engine^[8]. Earlier templates used hard-coded PHP.

Earlier versions of Drupal's theming system were criticized ^[9] as being less design-oriented and more complicated than the systems for Mambo and Plone. The inclusion of the PHPTemplate and XTemplate engines in Drupal has addressed some of these criticisms.

Translations

As of August 2007, translations for Drupal's interface were available in 37 languages plus English (the default).^[10] Some read right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Criticism

Some^[11] have considered Drupal more difficult to learn and slightly more difficult to install than some simple CMS programs or basic blogging tools such as WordPress. Drupal 5.0, released January 15, 2007, is packaged with a Web-based installer to partly answer these criticisms, and Drupal 6.0, currently in beta, goes even further in simplifying installation.^[12]

Some programmers criticize Drupal because they perceive it as not being OOP, but Drupal programming from an object-oriented perspective explains how OOP and AOP principles apply to Drupal.

Distributions

Customized Drupal distributions include some repackaged with third-party modules, some with modifications to the core, including vbDrupal, which is Drupal integrated with vBulletin.

Drupal 4.2 ^[13] was used for DeanSpace, which hosted many independent Web sites supporting the 2004 presidential campaign of Howard Dean. After the Dean campaign ended, the DeanSpace project grew into CivicSpace, a Drupal-based "grassroots organizing platform that empowers collective action inside communities and cohesively connects remote groups of supporters." Thus CivicSpace is a spinoff distribution based on Drupal 4.2.

Many innovations in CivicSpace have been incorporated back into the Drupal project itself^[14]. Features particularly useful for nonprofit organizations and political campaigns are provided in the CiviCRM module for Drupal 5.0 and higher.

It has been suggested to distribute "pre-made" Drupal installations that are pre-customized with third party modules and configured towards a particular type of Web site: an online store, a music review site, a blogging site, etc.

Notes

^ Deelstra, Heine (2007-10-17). "Drupal 4.7.8 and 5.3 released: Security updates and bugfixes" (HTML). Drupal. Retrieved 2007-10-17.
^ http://drupal.org/node/769
^ "Drupal Download Statistics," http://buytaert.net/tag/statistics
^ "Growth Graphs," http://groups.drupal.org/node/1980
^ The features of Drupal's core are described in the online "Drupal Handbook" at http://drupal.org/handbook/modules.
^ Amazon Items
^ "PHPTemplate theme engine", Drupal.org.
^ "XTemplate theme engine", Drupal.org.
^ "How does Drupal compare to Mambo?" discussion thread, Drupal.org.
^ "Translations," Drupal.org http://drupal.org/project/Translations (retrieved 12 August 2007)
^ Alister Lewis-Bowen et al., "Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site," IBM, July 11, 2006.
^ Drupal 5.0 Feature List January 15, 2007. Accessed January 15, 2007.
^ http://drupal.org/node/4877#comment-7552
^ CivicSpace

External links

Companies that provide commercial services for Drupal

SuccessIdeaweb.com Drupal Development based in Malaysia

[1] Deelstra, Heine (2007-10-17). "Drupal 4.7.8 and 5.3 released: Security updates and bugfixes" (HTML). Drupal. Retrieved 2007-10-17.

[2] ttp://drupal.org/node/769

[3] "Drupal Download Statistics," http://buytaert.net/tag/statistics

[4] "Growth Graphs," http://groups.drupal.org/node/1980

[5] The features of Drupal's core are described in the online "Drupal Handbook" at http://drupal.org/handbook/modules.

[6] Amazon Items

[7] "PHPTemplate theme engine", Drupal.org.

[8] "XTemplate theme engine", Drupal.org.

[9] "How does Drupal compare to Mambo?" discussion thread, Drupal.org.

[10] "Translations," Drupal.org http://drupal.org/project/Translations (retrieved 12 August 2007)

[11] Alister Lewis-Bowen et al., "Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site," IBM, July 11, 2006.

[12] Drupal 5.0 Feature List January 15, 2007. Accessed January 15, 2007.

[13] ttp://drupal.org/node/4877#comment-7552

[14] CivicSpace

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@@ Line 17: / Line 17: @@
 Drupal runs in many environments, including [[Windows]], [[Mac OS X]], [[Linux]], [[FreeBSD]], and any platform that supports either the [[Apache HTTP Server|Apache]] (version 1.3+), or [[Internet Information Services|IIS]] (version IIS5+) Web server and the [[PHP]] language (version 4.3.3+). Drupal requires a database such as [[MySQL]] or [[PostgreSQL]] to store content and settings. (Requirements are available at Drupal's [http://drupal.org/requirements web site]).
-As of [[October 17]], [[2007]], the current version of Drupal is 5.3.<ref>{{cite web | first = Heine | last = Deelstra | title = Drupal 4.7.8 and 5.3 released: Security updates and bugfixes. | publisher = Drupal | date = 2007-10-17 | url = http://drupal.org/drupal-5.3 | format = HTML | accessdate = 2007-10-17}}</ref>  The second beta release of Version 6.0, which has reached "[[Freeze (software engineering)|feature freeze]]," occurred on October 18, 2007.
+As of [[October 17]], [[2007]], the current version of Drupal is 5.3.<ref>{{cite web | first = Heine | last = Deelstra | title = Drupal 4.7.8 and 5.3 released: Security updates and bugfixes. | publisher = Drupal | date = 2007-10-17 | url = http://drupal.org/drupal-5.3 | format = HTML | accessdate = 2007-10-17}}</ref>  The third beta release of Version 6.0, which has reached "[[Freeze (software engineering)|feature freeze]]," occurred on November 21, 2007.
 == History ==