History of Drupal

In 2000, permanent Internet connections were at a premium for University of Antwerp students, so Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder set up a wireless bridge between their student dorms to share Hans's ADSL modem connection among eight students. While this was an extremely luxurious situation at that time, something was missing: There was no means to discuss or share simple things.

This inspired Dries to work on a small news site with a built-in web board, allowing the group of friends to leave each other notes about the status of the network, to announce where they were having dinner, or to share some noteworthy news items.

The software did not have a name until the day after Dries moved out after graduation. The group decided to put the internal website online so they could stay in touch, keep sharing interesting findings, and narrate snippets of their personal lives. While looking for a suitable domain name, Dries settled for 'drop.org' after he made a typo to see if the the name 'dorp.org' was still available. Dorp is the Dutch word for 'village', which was considered a fitting name for the small community.

Once drop.org was established on the Web, its audience changed as the members began talking about new web technologies, such as moderation, syndication, rating, and distributed authentication. Drop.org slowly turned into a personal experimentation environment, driven by the discussions and flow of ideas. The discussions about these web technologies were tried out on drop.org itself as new additions to the software running the site.

It was only later, in January 2001, that Dries decided to release the software behind drop.org as "Drupal." The purpose was to enable others to use and extend the experimentation platform so that more people could explore new paths for development. The name Drupal, pronounced "droo-puhl," derives from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word "druppel," which means "drop."[1]

Drupalicon

After Drupal had been created, an obvious matter was the choice and creation of a logo. Of course it would have to do something with a drop... or water.

The inital idea was simple: a drop in a circle. . It was featured as an "O" in a liquidish "Drop".

When the community grew, the idea came up of a cartoony drop with a face. Steven Wittens (UnConeD) created a 3D drop, but the idea didn't get too far mainly because 3D is hard to print, hard to edit, etc.

When the logo-issue had come up again, Kristjan Jansen (Kika) came up with idea of putting two side-way drops together to form an infinity-sign. When put into a filled circle, it resembled a face. After some more work by Steven Wittens, the Druplicon was created: a stylised drop with the infinity eyes, a round nose and a mischievous smile.

That's the 'story' behind it... I like the idea that the infinity-eyes symbolise the infinite possibilities that Drupal offers :)[2]

The Drupal core

• Founder and Lead Developer. Drupal was founded by Dries Buytaert, who retains primary control over the software and makes most decisions on proposed changes. In approving or rejecting proposals and patches, he gives special weight to comments made by people he trusts and respects for their past contributions to Drupal.
• Core committers. A small team that reviews proposed changes and maintains code. They are the only ones who have write access to the core CVS repository.
  • Permanent core committers
    Permanent core committers are Dries Buytaert.
  • Branch maintainers
    Current branch maintainers are Gerhard Killesreiter (killes) for 4.7.x, Neil Drumm (drumm) for 5.x, and Gábor Hojtsy for 6.x. See this post for details.
• Maintainer. Though not directly making decisions, maintainers have informal responsibility for a designated portion of the core (for example, a particular core module). Individual areas of responsibility are listed in the file MAINTAINERS.txt. Maintainers are appointed by Dries. Core contributors who have made substantive contributions (particularly to a core component not individually maintained) may apply for Maintainer status by writing to Dries. Dries may also individually invite them.
• Core contributor. Core contributors are those who contribute code patches or documentation for the Drupal core. The contributions are peer reviewed and then decided on by Dries or another of the core committers. Anyone can submit patches against Drupal core.[3]