Drupal as a Strong CMS
What is Drupal?
Drupal is a free and open sourced content management system (CMS). It has a very flexible design which allows the features to be added and removing them by installing or uninstalling the module. The entire look and design of the website is done by installing or uninstalling the Themes. It contains a Drupal Core which is a base Drupal Download. This Drupal Core contains the PHP scripts which runs basic CMS functionalities, several optional modules and themes, many JavaScript, CSS and image assets. You may also download many other modules and themes from the Drupal.org website.
Drupal has a functionality of running on other technology stack like:
- The operating system can be Windows or Mac OS instead of Linux
- Web Server can be Nginx or IIS instead of Apache
- The database can be PostgreSQL or SQLite instead of MySQL, or a MySQL-compatible replacement such as MariaDB or Percona.
What is the History of the Drupal?
In a year 2000 Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder whom were the two students of the University of Antwerp, needed an internet connection. Latter was rare for Antwerp students, so they started up a wireless bridge between their dorms. They required a place to talk to each other, so Dries, who is still known as a founder of Drupal, started a small news site with a web board, where he and his friends were able to talk about so that they can meet, share interesting news and so on.
The software they had built was nameless untill he was graduated. But after that they wished to stay in touch, so they put the internal site online. When looking for the right domain name, Dries considered »dorp.org«, as a Dutch for village. He mistakenly typed it into »drop« and it got stucked. Later, he considered that mistake sounded better. From then, website attracted some new members, and they started talking about new web technologies and other ideas.
It wasn't until January 2001 that Dries took step to release the software behind drop.org and from that Drupal became an open source project. The name Drupal was derived from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word "druppel," which means "drop." It needed a symbol too, so Kristjan Jansen and Steven Wittens stylised a Druplicon with eyes, curved nose and a mischievous smile.
Why use Drupal?
There are also other Content Management systems which you may use for creating your own site but we have very clearly described here reasons which may diverge you towards using the Drupal Content Management System.
You can build a very small and simple website made up of HTML pages. Using Drupal CMS may take some time for set up at start but gives more benefits w.r.t others. From here I mean that you can simply edit the content online, you can create more complex features which requires a database and you can do uniformity.
Building your own CMS-type software can seem attractive. However, using a general-purpose CMS like Drupal as a starting point is usually a better idea, because the basic CMS functionality (such as user accounts and content management) has thousands of developer hours behind it, including many years of user testing, bug fixing, and security hardening.
Some CMS software packages are expensive to purchase a license for. Some are free or have a free version, but have restrictive licenses that do not allow you to make modifications and extensions.
What is Drupal 1.0?
The first version of Drupal based on Slash, a modular CMS, and Scoop. There were 18 core modules, each one had a PHP file which contained a set of routines. In fact, everything was accessible by PHP files, because there was no menu router. The code was needed to be input into one of the seven hooks in the modules. The admin one was the one which could be used only by administrators. To modify database, a SQL file was imported. There were only 15 tables. Themes were already in the core. They were simple, elegant and flexible. You were given access to create your own themes, because you can control colors, mark-up, layout, and block positioning. Features included story submissions, diary, accounts, comments, search, RDF headlines and a calendar. Any user could become a contributor.
What is Drupal 2.0?
Now we will talk about the second version of Drupal which was released on 15. 3 2001. It was improved with one major thing named as translation feature. Many people loved to see less English and more of their own language, so Drupal gave them access to either create or overwrite their site in a different language. To do that, they had to manually edit the configuration file and SQL database. Some more additions were also made in this version, like user ratings, sections for stories, a user permission system and comment rewrite ability.
What is Drupal 3.0?
Then the third version took place and everything was based on nodes. They became a primary unit for the content. All types of content (book, story, forum, diary, blog) existed as a node and node module managed those all. Only comments were not nodes but they were only connected to them. The decision to focus Drupal on Nodes was were early and not on pages. But it wasn't until ten years later that nodes became the basics for the mobile web and that web resolved less and less around pages.
We will discuss the evolution from Drupal 4.0 to Drupal 8.0 in one of our next blog posts.
Drupal is Beneficial and gives more features
Drupal is known to be a right tool to serve your content management strategy. Drupal is also in use of business and business holders. We will discuss here some benefits and features of the Drupal in detail.
Scalability: Drupal is highly scalable as it can also manage the large traffic websites which are more complex. From example weather.com has a high traffic as it updates about the daily whether which is managed by Drupal.
Mobile Responsive: Build responsive sites and also create web applications that deliver optimal visitor experiences, no matter what device they’re on. Drupal supports responsive design best practices and ensures your users get a seamless content experience every time, on every device.
Integrated digital application: Drupal integrates easily with a wide ecosystem of digital marketing technology and other business applications, so you can use the best set of tools today, and flex with new tools tomorrow. And, Drupal’s API-first focus means connecting content to other sites and applications, making content more powerful.
Secure: Drupal sites have intensive security which keeps their eyes and ears everywhere and every time.
Easy Content Editing: There is availability of tools through which you can create and publish the content. Many authors, developers, publishers and site admins have Drupal in their use for fulfilling their requirements.
Flexible Architecture of content: It create the right content architecture using the Admin Interface or do it programmatically. It shows only the content appropriate for each context with powerful display mode tools and Views. Include a variety of media types (images, video, pdfs, etc.). Customizable menus create a comfortable user experience, creating paths to content across multiple devices.
Multisite: It has the functionality to manage many sites through your organization, brands, geographies and campaigns. This is the platform which offers quick creation of the site and deployment.
Unlimited Tools: Drupal doesn’t dictate to the business; the business dictates what it needs from Drupal. Too many CMS platforms impose their will on your business, forcing you to conform to their way of doing things. Drupal acts the opposite way: use Drupal to create a solution that supports your specific business needs. Drupal creates a foundation for limitless solutions.
Foundation of strong stack: Drupal lives on a modern LAMP technology stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, which together are meeting the needs of fast-moving, flexible, agile enterprises and brands building next generation digital platforms.