Drupal features

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:

• UN End Poverty by 2015
• Britney Spears
• Jennifer Lopez
• Harvard's Science and Engineering department
• Playstation Asia
• The Onion
• The News is NowPublic
• TWiT.TV
• Warner Bros.