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==Community==
==Community==
Drupal has a large community of users and developers. More than 550,000 user accounts have been created on Drupal.org, and over 2000 people have signed up for developer accounts. The Drupal conference happens twice a year. The next conference is happening in Paris, France. The last major conference in the USA, Drupalcon [[Washington DC]] 2009, attracted over 1400 people.<ref>{{cite web |url=
Drupal has a large community of users and developers. More than 550,000 user accounts have been created on Drupal.org, and over 2000 people have signed up for developer accounts. The Drupal conference happens twice a year. The next conference is happening in San Francisco, California. The last major conference in the USA, Drupalcon [[Washington DC]] 2009, attracted over 1400 people.<ref>{{cite web |url=


http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/news/drupalcon-dc-numbers-community-profit-and-sustainability |title=DrupalCon DC By the Numbers: Community, Profit, and Sustainability |last=Bogle |first=Bonnie |work=drupalcon.org |accessdate=2009-04-08 }}</ref> The last European conference, Drupalcon [[Szeged]] 2008, held in late August 2008, had an attendance of 500.
http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/news/drupalcon-dc-numbers-community-profit-and-sustainability |title=DrupalCon DC By the Numbers: Community, Profit, and Sustainability |last=Bogle |first=Bonnie |work=drupalcon.org |accessdate=2009-04-08 }}</ref> Drupalcon [[Szeged]] 2008, held in late August 2008, had an attendance of 500.


There are a number of active Drupal [http://drupal.org/forum/ forums], [http://drupal.org/mailing-lists mailing lists] and [http://groups.drupal.org/ discussion groups]. Drupal also maintains several [[IRC]] [http://drupal.org/node/108355 channels] on the [[Freenode]] network.
There are a number of active Drupal [http://drupal.org/forum/ forums], [http://drupal.org/mailing-lists mailing lists] and [http://groups.drupal.org/ discussion groups]. Drupal also maintains several [[IRC]] [http://drupal.org/node/108355 channels] on the [[Freenode]] network.

Revision as of 00:48, 14 September 2009

Drupal
Initial releaseJanuary 2001 (2001-01)
Stable release
6.13 / July 2, 2009 (2009-07-02)
Repository
Written inPHP
Operating systemCross-platform
TypeContent management framework, Content management system, Community and Blog software
LicenseGNU General Public License version 2
Websitehttp://drupal.org

Drupal (Template:PronEng) is a free and open source[1] Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP.[2][3] It is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites.[4]. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to most CMSs. These include the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts, administration menus, RSS-feeds, customizable layout, flexible account privileges, logging, a blogging system, an Internet forum, and options to create a classic brochureware website or an interactive community website.

Drupal was also designed to allow new features and custom behavior to be added by third parties. For this reason, Drupal is sometimes described as a content management framework.[2] Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.[5]

Drupal can run on any computing platform that supports both a web server capable of running PHP version 4.3.5+ (including Apache, IIS, Lighttpd, and nginx) and a database (such as MySQL or PostgreSQL) to store content and settings.[3]

History

Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board, Drupal became an open source project in 2001.[6] Drupal is an English rendering of the Dutch word “druppel”, which means “drop” (as in “a water droplet”).[7] 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”) for its community aspects, but made a typo when checking the domain name and thought it sounded better.[6]

From May 2007 to April 2008, Drupal was downloaded from the Drupal.org website more than 1.4 million times, an increase of approximately 125% from the previous year.[8][9] A large community now helps develop Drupal.[10]

Drupal's popularity is growing rapidly. Over 70 well-known brand names and not-for-profit organizations now use Drupal. [11]

As of July 2009, Drupal 6.13 is the latest release.[12] Drupal is a winner of several Packt Open Source CMS Awards[13] and three times (in a row) a winner in the Webware 100.[14][15]

Drupal core

Drupal core is the stock installation of Drupal, which can be optionally extended by third party contributions. In Drupal's default configuration, website content can be contributed by either registered or anonymous users (at the discretion of the administrator) and made accessible to web visitors by a variety of selectable criteria including by date, category, searches, etc. Drupal core also includes a hierarchical taxonomy system, which allows content to be categorized or tagged with key words for easier access.[5]

Drupal maintains a detailed changelog of core feature updates by version.[16]

Core modules

Drupal core includes core modules which can be enabled by the administrator to extend the functionality of the core website.[17]

The core Drupal distribution provides a number of features[17], including:

Column-generating template families

The templates listed here are not interchangeable. For example, using {{col-float}} with {{col-end}} instead of {{col-float-end}} would leave a <div>...</div> open, potentially harming any subsequent formatting.

Column templates
Type Family
Handles wiki
table code?†
 Responsive/
mobile suited 		Start template Column divider End template
Float "col-float" Yes Yes {{col-float}} {{col-float-break}} {{col-float-end}}
"columns-start" Yes Yes {{columns-start}} {{column}} {{columns-end}}
Columns "div col" Yes Yes {{div col}} – {{div col end}}
"columns-list" No Yes {{columns-list}} (wraps div col) – –
Flexbox "flex columns" No Yes {{flex columns}} – –
Table "col" Yes No {{col-begin}},
{{col-begin-fixed}} or
{{col-begin-small}} 		{{col-break}} or
{{col-2}} .. {{col-5}} 		{{col-end}}

† Can template handle the basic wiki markup {| | || |- |} used to create tables? If not, special templates that produce these elements (such as {{(!}}, {{!}}, {{!!}}, {{!-}}, {{!)}})—or HTML tags (<table>...</table>, <tr>...</tr>, etc.)—need to be used instead.

Core themes

The color editor being used to adjust the "Garland" core theme

Drupal core includes several core themes, which customize the aesthetic look-and-feel of the site. These themes can be chosen by the administrator via a special menu.[18]

The Color Module, introduced in Drupal core 5.0, allows administrators to change the color scheme of certain themes via a Web-browser interface. This feature was added to allow a higher level of customization for the average non-coder.[19]

Translations

As of February 2008, translations for Drupal's interface were available in 44 languages plus English (the default).[20] Some read right to left, such as Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew. Drupal 6 provides improved support for content and content administration in multiple languages.[21]

Auto-update notification

Drupal can automatically notify the administrator when a new version of any module, theme, or the Drupal core itself, becomes available. This feature can help keep a Drupal installation up-to-date with the latest features and security fixes.[21]

An auto-update module for the older version 5.x provides identical functionality, but it is not included in the core release.[22]

Extending Drupal core

Drupal core is designed to be modular with a system of hooks and callbacks, which are accessed internally via an API.[23] This design allows third-party contributed (often abbreviated to "contrib") modules and themes to extend or override Drupal's default behaviors without changing Drupal core's code.

Drupal's modular design, which isolates Drupal core's files from contributed module and themes, increases flexibility and security and allows Drupal administrators to cleanly upgrade to new releases of Drupal core without potentially overwriting their site's customizations.[citation needed] To maintain this separation, Drupal administrators are instructed to avoid altering Drupal core's software.

Contributed modules

Contributed Drupal modules offer a variety of features including image galleries, custom content types and content listings, WYSIWYG editors, private messaging, 3rd-party integration tools[24], and more. The Drupal website lists over 4600 free modules (as of August 1, 2009), written and contributed to by the Drupal community.[25][26][27]

  • Content Construction Kit (CCK) allows site administrators to dynamically create content types. A content type describes any kind of information to be stored in the website's database. These may include, but are not limited to, events, invitations, reviews, articles, or products.
  • Views facilitates the retrieval and presentation of content to site visitors.

The CCK Fields API has been integrated into Drupal core in the development Drupal 7 branch.[28]

Contributed themes

Contributed themes adapt or replace a Drupal site's default look and feel.

Drupal themes use standardized formats that may be generated by common third-party theme design engines. Many themes for Drupal are written in the PHPTemplate engine[29] or, to a lesser extent, the XTemplate engine.[30] Some templates use hard-coded PHP.

Although early versions of Drupal's theming system were criticized[31] for being less design-oriented and more complicated than those for Mambo, Joomla! and Plone, the inclusion of the PHPTemplate and XTemplate engines in Drupal has addressed some of these concerns.[citation needed] The new Drupal 6 theming system utilizes a template engine in an attempt to further separate HTML/CSS from PHP. A new Drupal development module, Devel, provides assistance to theme authors who use Drupal 6.

Community contributed Drupal themes at the Drupal website are released under GPL license (free), and most of them are demonstrated at the Drupal Theme Garden.

Criticism

  • Usability: Some aspects of Drupal's administration interface can be confusing and intimidating, particularly for new administrators.[32] According to the Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore, Drupal lacks an intuitive, easy administration user interface.[33][34][35] The administration area is regarded as clunky and cryptic with Drupal version 5 and 6, but improved ease of use is planned with the upcoming version 7. According to Dries Buytaert, Drupal 7 won't be released until 90% of the problems identified by the University of Minnesota[36][37] and the University of Baltimore[35] are solved. Usability will be one of the main improvements in Drupal 7 that will close the gap with easier CMSs.
  • Backward Compatibility (for software development): Drupal's designers have decided that, in terms of programming, backward compatibility may be sacrificed with each major revision.[40] As a result, sometimes a new version's code is not compatible with a previous version. This means that contrib module and theme developers may be required to re-work some or all of their previous code to ensure compatibility with the latest version of Drupal.[41][42]
  • Performance / Scalability: In 2006, performance tests between Drupal 4.x and Joomla 1.x branch demonstrated that Drupal's Web pages were delivered 44% slower compared with Joomla. To improve performance, Drupal offers caching to store static pages, the use of which resulted in a 508% improvement. However, static pages are typically only delivered to anonymous visitors who have not logged in. Thus, dramatic performance improvements from caching may not reflect real-world usage of a Drupal site.[43] Like performance, scalability, or the ability for a Web site to handle a growing number of concurrent visitors, can become a concern on large interactive sites. Scalability is typically improved by optimizations of the code.[citation needed] Particularly, SQL query caching can help offset the load to the database server caused by Drupal's high query rate.[44][45] Since version 6, Drupal caches database schema as well as elements such as blocks, forms and menus.[46] Development versions of Drupal 7 increase performance in database queries with simultaneous performance decreases in PHP code usage.[47]

Security

As security holes are discovered, Drupal core is regularly[clarification needed] updated to new versions. Administrators of Drupal sites are automatically notified of these new releases via the Update Status module.[22] Additionally, Drupal.org maintains a security announcement mailing list, a history of all security advisories,[48] a security team home page,and an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. In 2008, eleven security vulnerabilities were reported and fixed in Drupal core.[48] Security holes were also found and fixed in 64 of the 2243 user-contributed modules.[48][49]

Maintainers of Drupal modules can decline to follow contemporary security recommendations. For example, the Views module maintainer declines to adopt security by design, instead allowing the module's default configuration to expose content the site maintainer might otherwise want hidden from the public.[50]

Distributions

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

Drupal 4.2 [51] was used for DeanSpace, which hosted many independent websites supporting the 2004 U.S. 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."

Acquia

In 2007, a Drupal-focused company, Acquia, was created by Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson. Acquia announced a subscription-based service for Drupal at Drupalcon Boston 2008 and started services with Acquia Drupal, a distribution based on Drupal 6, in September 2008. Subscriptions include one or more Drupal distributions, a set of companion network-supplied value-add services, and access to a Technical Assistance Center.[52]

Community

Drupal has a large community of users and developers. More than 550,000 user accounts have been created on Drupal.org, and over 2000 people have signed up for developer accounts. The Drupal conference happens twice a year. The next conference is happening in San Francisco, California. The last major conference in the USA, Drupalcon Washington DC 2009, attracted over 1400 people.[53] Drupalcon Szeged 2008, held in late August 2008, had an attendance of 500.

There are a number of active Drupal forums, mailing lists and discussion groups. Drupal also maintains several IRC channels on the Freenode network.

There are over 20 national communities around drupal.org offering language-specific support.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Licensing FAQ". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  2. ^ a b "The Drupal Overview". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  3. ^ a b "System Requirements". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  4. ^ Lincoln (2008-09-24). "45 Sites You May Not Have Known Were Drupal-Based". Social CMS Buzz. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  5. ^ a b "Features". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  6. ^ a b "History". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  7. ^ "Druppel: Dutch to English Translation". Babylon Translation. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  8. ^ Buytaert, Dries (2008). "Drupal Download Statistics". Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  9. ^ Buytaert, Dries (2007). "Drupal Download Statistics". Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  10. ^ Koenig, Josh. "Growth Graphs". Groups.Drupal. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  11. ^ "Who is Using Drupal?". Us&V. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  12. ^ "Drupal Project downloads". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-07-03.
  13. ^ "OSS CMS Award Previous Winners". Packt Publishing. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  14. ^ http://drupal.org/Drupal-2009-webware-100-winner
  15. ^ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13546_109-10237630-29.html?tag=mncol
  16. ^ "View of /drupal/CHANGELOG.txt". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  17. ^ a b "Handbook: Core Modules". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  18. ^ Buytaert, Dries. "Garland, the new default core theme". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  19. ^ "Color: Allows the user to change the color scheme of certain themes". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  20. ^ "Translations". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  21. ^ a b "Drupal 6.0 released". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  22. ^ a b "Module: Update Status". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  23. ^ "API Reference". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  24. ^ Integrating Drupal with External Systems
  25. ^ "Modules". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  26. ^ Nash, Tim (2007-01-08). "CCK & Views the ultimate combination, part 1". The Venture Skills Blog. Retrieved 2009-04-08. Two modules particularly important to typical Drupal installations
  27. ^ Safuto, Robert (2007-07-30). "Drupal CCK and Views Tutorial". Awakened Voice Learning Center. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  28. ^ "Field API". 2009. Retrieved 2009-05-08.
  29. ^ "PHPTemplate theme engine". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  30. ^ "XTemplate theme engine". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  31. ^ "How does Drupal compare to Mambo? discussion thread". drupal.org. 2005-01-17. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  32. ^ a b Hagopian, Peter (2008-07-10). "Drupal Addresses Security In 6.3, Usability in 7". Information Week. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  33. ^ Scollan, Becca (2008-05-01). "Drupal Usability Research Report" (PDF). Retrieved 2009-04-08. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  34. ^ Lal, Kieran (2008-06-26). "Drupal usability tests from the University of Baltimore with community solutions". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  35. ^ a b Buytaert, Dries (2008-07-03). "Usability, usability, and usability". Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  36. ^ Buytaert, Dries (2008-03-10). "First results from usability testing". Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  37. ^ "Report from Formal Drupal" (PDF). 2008-03-03. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  38. ^ Howard, Brian C. (2007-01-25). "Harnessing Drupal for Citizen Journalism". NewAssignment.Net. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  39. ^ "CMS Review: Drupal". Live-CMS.com. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  40. ^ Buytaert, Dries (2006-05-26). "Backward Compatibility". Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  41. ^ Buytaert, Dries (2006-07-27). "The pain before the pay-off". Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  42. ^ Drupal's Upgrade Instructions (end-user)
  43. ^ Buytaert, Dries (2006-08-11). "Drupal vs Joomla performance". Retrieved 2009-05-20.
  44. ^ "Speed up a Drupal web site by enabling MySQL query caching". nadeausoftware.com. 2007-03-07. Retrieved 2009-06-21.
  45. ^ Book on Drupal Performance & Scalability
  46. ^ "Caching in Drupal 6". drupal.org. 2008-07-28. Retrieved 2009-06-21.
  47. ^ "Drupal 6 vs Drupal 7 performance and comments vs nodes". CivicActions.com. 2009-05-19. Retrieved 2009-06-21.
  48. ^ a b c "Security advisories". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-28.
  49. ^ "Contributed modules". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-28.
  50. ^ http://drupal.org/node/80359
  51. ^ "Predictions for 2004 discussion thread". drupal.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  52. ^ "Acquia FAQ". Acquia. Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  53. ^ Bogle, Bonnie. "DrupalCon DC By the Numbers: Community, Profit, and Sustainability". drupalcon.org. Retrieved 2009-04-08.

Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Drupal.
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