The beginning of Drupal history is very well documented on Drupal.org itself, I will augment the beginning of the story.
In 1999, a University of Antwerp student, Dries Buytaert was quite interested in wireless networking, he was maintaing the relevant FAQ for Linux. Wireless networking was so new (802.11b was standardized in 1999 October) that the FAQ contained “Why would I want a wireless LAN?” to which the longish answer closed with “Not to mention the fact it will make the geek in you go nuts”. In 2000, he put this knowledge into practical use: he and Hans Snijder shared Hans' ADSL connection among eight students in their dorm. The community needed a website to share information about the status of the network, about dinner... When Dries moved out after graduation, the website moved on the Internet, it was to be named “dorp.org” after the Dutch word for “village” but Dries made a typo, so the website became “drop.org”. The focus, of course changed -- you obviously would not read this if they would have only talked about dinner. No, the group began to talk about new web technologies, such as moderation, syndication, rating, and distributed authentication. To continue the Dutch-English play with words, when the software behind the site is released in January 2001, it's named Drupal as that's the English pronunciation of the Dutch translation of drop (druppel). It's very important to note motivitation for this software: it was a technology playground for a community lead by a hardcore geek who already had quite an experience from his Linux years about what could become of an open source software written by a community. Commercial gain of any sorts was not a goal and there were no pre-determined set of features.
Writing the chronicle gets harder and harder as the years pass because so many contributors joined the community and a lot of people would deserve to get his story known. And yet, we want to keep this article somewhat short, so I will jump many years, until May 2004.
First, Zack Rosen and Neil Drumm founds CivicSpace (formerly known as Hack4Dean and then DeanSpace). The importance of DeanSpace/CivicSpace is awareness -- while Drupal is no doubt the best already, it's almost unknown to the world at this time. If we need to name one thing that changed this, then DS/CS is it. (I can't resist to mention that un the same month, at the other end of the world, in a small rural town in Hungary, Karoly Negyesi, who becomes the most active developer of Drupal for many years to come, hears about Drupal for the first time...) 2004 summer sees the foundation of Bryght in Vancouver. Bryght is one of the first Drupal consultancy companies and their team very actively participate in the community. Drupal is now poised for world domination -- James Walker, one of the Bryght founders registers drupal-world-domination.com in 2004 november 1.
In October 18, 2004 Drupal 4.5 gets released -- the changes are bigger than ever: menu becomes editable, custom profile fields get introduced, attachments are now possible, multiple input formats are possible and the UI is translatable through the administration interface and via .po files. From an enduser standpoint, not until Drupal 5.0 will see as big changes as in this release.
Let's jump again, to the first developer meeting in Antwerp, 2005 February. Screennames got faces, friendships born and the idea of the security team start, to be realized in two months. Big, serious websites began to appear using Drupal and Drupal 4.6.0 gets released in April. This is the last release for a very very long time -- it will take more than a year for another Drupal to appear. Meanwhile, there are no less than three more DrupalCons: one in Portland in 2005 August, one in Amsterdam in 2005 October and one in Vancouver 2006 February. Later on, there will only be two DrupalCons a year -- Brussels 2006 September, Sunnyvale 2007 March and Barcelona 2007 September.
In 2005 summer, Google holds the first Summer of Code, where Drupal gets 11 slots. Of the 11 students, Fabiano Parolin Sant'Ana and Angela Byron is still active (and somewhat Steven Wittens). Angie (aka webchick) becomes one of the most important contributors for Drupal, ever since we participate in SoC in the (vain) hope of scoring another win like her. Also, we get some unit testing during SoC. 2005 summer sees both CCK (by Jon Van Dyk and Jonathan Chaffer) and Views (by Earl Miles) modules committed into Drupal.org CVS. While Drupal core itself is a great community tool on one hand, on the other hand it's a clean, lean, extensible framework that lets you code pretty much any website you want, these two modules lets you create extremely complex websites without much coding: CCK lets you define custom content types and Views lets you create complx listings -- both just with a few clicks.
Since then, the most important change in Drupal -- from an enduser's point of view -- was the acceptance of jQuery JavaScript library in Drupal 5.0. True to the spirit of Drupal, this library is small, modular, fast and does things right :) This greatly helped the usability of Drupal. In 2007 november, Packt Publishing gives Drupal the best CMS award.
