Drupal - Overview of a Social Publishing Platform

Drupal is a modular Open Source Software application written in PHP which can be used to build many different types of websites.  One common use of Drupal is to build community sites, but that is simply one way to use this content management framework.  Started in 2000 as a project among college students in Belgium,  Drupal was released to the public under the GPL (version 2 or later) in January 2001.  Dries Buytaert is the project founder, leader, and current president of the Drupal Association.  Since that initial release, one of Drupal's major growth points was the 2004 presidential campain of Howard Dean where Drupal was used.  In the most recent major release of Drupal, version 6.0, over 900 contributors provided enhancements that were committed and thousands more provided advice on how to improve the software.  This broad base of involvement is seen as a differentiator of Drupal compared to other similar software.

What is "Drupal"?

Over the years Drupal has grown to be much more than simply a web application.  While for some people "Drupal" is simply the single set of files known as "Drupal core" most project enthusiasts also recognize "Drupal" to include: the hundreds of thousands of people who are members of drupal.org, groups.drupal.org and regional Drupal users groups; the thousands of themes and modules available in the "Contributions" repository; the various supporting teams and their artifacts such as Documentation and Security; and the Drupal Association whose mission is to provide support for the Drupal software package, primarily by running drupal.org and coordinating legal issues and major events.

Values of the Drupal Community

The Drupal project is guided by a mission and a set of 7 principles.  There are also several community norms which are often confusing to people when they first learn about Drupal:

• Drupal has embraced the phrase "the drop is always moving" meaning that the project values staying on the cutting edge and better ways of doing things over API stability.  All of the users data is maintained from one version of Drupal to the next, but the different modules and functions which make up the Drupal API may change drastically.  This has helped Drupal to stay flexible as web technologies change and is generally seen as a strong point of the project.
• "Contributions are gold" is an updated version of the earlier phrase "Code is gold."  This is "contributions" in the sense of adding something of value to the project.  Rather than get stuck in debates about something which may never happen, the project aims to keep its focus on doing things.
  

Who is using Drupal?

While Drupal was initially used as a news and messaging system, it quickly grew to be useful for a wide variety of applications.  The Howard Dean campaign's use of Drupal increased its visibility as a platform for political and non-profit use spawning thousands of Drupal sites in that arena.  Usage by large media sites such as The Onion and MTV UK are signs of its suitably to large scale publishing and community purposes.

Complaints about Drupal

In addition to needing to learn some of the values of the community, there are other common complaints about Drupal.  Many new users are confused by the terminology such as "node" and "taxonomy."  The relatively rapid release schedule (a new release approximately every year) can also cause problems for people who prefer to create a site and leave it alone for a few years.  The lack of a roadmap is often confusing, but this is mitigated by the tradition of "Personal battle plans" (threads for 6.x and 7.x) and Predictions for each year (2007 and 2008).