Let's see a brief list of the most important features of Drupal as accessible from a browser ie. not by creating and editing program files.
- Node system. A node is the fundamental piece of Drupal, it holds content.
- The nodes can have revisions. It's possible to track the time and the author of every change along with some log message about the change. It's possible revert to earlier revisions. There is a contributored module which shows the difference between two revisions.
- Content is organized by a full, hiearchical taxonomy system. One taxonomy term can be applied to many nodes and one node can belong to many taxonomy terms. Taxonomy terms can form a tree (or an even complex structure where a term can have multiple parents) and several such trees can exist, we call them vocabularies. Every term provides an RSS feed of the nodes belonging to it.
- Can aggregate RSS feeds.
- Search enginge friendleness. It's not just that the system does not use ? in most paths but the webmaster can set a visitor- and search engine alias for every page.
- Distributed authentication. Drupal system can trust each other and with contributed modules you can authenticate against LDAP, OpenID etc.
- Role and permission based user management. Each role can contain any number of permissions and the user can be in any number of roles and gets the sum of the permissions belonging to these roles.
I already mentioned contributed modules, named two extremely important ones in the history and some more in the features section. More than a thousand of those can be found at drupal.org/project/Modules. It's impossible to list all of them, a few more examples from the most popular modules: image, event, gallery, ecommerce and calendar (I guess the names make trivial what these do). One more important module is i18n -- while Drupal core supports the translation of the interface and there are many translation packs, you need i18n module for user supplied content translation. Drupal 6 will make big inroads to this area.
Another download category are themes. Everything that Drupal outputs can be customized by themes. Again, there are a huge number of themes downloadable from drupal.org/project/Themes. I would like to draw attention to Friends Electric and Bluebreeze.
Out of these modules and themes rise a number of popular, high traffic Drupal-based sites. Again, just a few examples:
Comments
Drupal does URL rewrites and generally is on-page optimized for search engines. This takes a lot of these SEO burdens away from the content developer and makes their content a lot more accessible via the search engines.
"Search enginge friendleness. It's not just that the system does not use ? in most paths but the webmaster can set a visitor- and search engine alias for every page"
I guess Drupal uses URL rewrites for this now. It just makes sense to get rid of URL parameters like ?ID=45 and replace it with something more meaningful to search engines since the URL does have some influence to your rankings. Not only that, but people do look at URLs as well in search engines to determine the relevance of the result too (not all but discerning searchers do).
I have always went with a self-hosted solution. It took me a while to come around to Wordpress. I used to run Movable Type. But now it’s all I use for blogs and Drupal is all I use for anything else.
We are getting ready to start developing in Drupal but we have been researching the differences between Drupal an WordPress... Can anyone provide any feedback between the pros and cons of each? Thanks!
It would be great to find a screencast covering this same top-level overview. Clients or those new to Drupal would _love_ to have a here's what Drupal is, how to add a node, place it in the menu or change the contact form. Nice work.
I'll be honest that's the first time I hear about Drupal. Sounds interesting, ambitious project. Got to love open source, keep up the good work.
after reading your article i became more familiar with drupal. Thank you
i became a fan of drupal.
Hi, Thanks for very interesting article. I really enjoyed reading all of your articles.
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