Open Source - Drupal
What is Drupal?
Drupal is an open source, easy to use, highly customizable, web-based content management system. It enables users to easily publish, categorize and manage a wide range of content including articles, bogs, videos, images and music on a website.
“Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including: community web portals, news publishing, discussion sites, corporate web sites, intranet applications, personal web sites or blogs, aficionado sites, e-commerce applications, international sites, education, art, music and multimedia sites, resource directories and social networking sites. The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as: Content Management Systems, Blogs, Collaborative authoring environments, Forums, Peer-to-peer networking, Newsletters, Podcasting, Picture galleries, File uploads and downloads and much more.”
Your site can be administered from anywhere, entirely using a web browser. A robust web interface is included to manage your site easily, efficiently and comprehensively. Content is compiled in a database that is organized into tables. Each table is made up of several rows. Each row is a collection of related fields. Themes controlling the look and presentation of the content can be set to the default, to a chosen theme downloaded from the internet or custom created. You can even allow visitors to select the theme.
Core Functionality
Role Based Permission System – Instead of tediously setting up permissions for each user, you can assign permissions to roles and then band together like users into a role group. The system had two default role groups: authenticated and anonymous. Authenticated users are those set-up with a user name password by the administrator or users that have signed up for an account. Anonymous users are those without an account or users not logged in. Users can have more than one role and additional role groups can be set up by the administrator.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) – This collection of Web feed formats can be used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts.
Taxonomy - "the science of classification". This system allows enabled users to classify content with thought many advanced features including tags and administrator-set terms.
WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) – The WYSIWYG editor interface allows a user to edit the content of a page. It is easy to use as it does not require knowledge of html coding and is configured in a format similar to commonly used programs like Microsoft Word. The preview function allows a user to view the
Friendly URLs – URL’s can be easily customized to the user preferences and to enhance search engine optimization.
Online help - A comprehensive online help system is included in the core help text of your site.
Searching - The integrated search module fully indexes the content of your site and allows a “smart” and easy-to-use search function to be added.
Contact Form – There are two contact form templates included in this program: personal contact and site-wide contact. Through personal contact forms users can send one another e-mail. And through site-wide contact forms users can send e-mail to the people in charge of your site. On the contact administration page you can set up "categories" of site-wide contact you'd like to receive. For example: "website feedback," or "product information." For each category, you can specify whom you'd like to have received your user's e-mail. The mail could go to one person or many. You can also specify whether or not the user will receive an automatic reply.
Collaborative Book – Users can create a "book" and then authorize other users to contribute content.
Poll Module – Enables users to create polls and which can appear on different pages.
Threaded comment model - Facilitates pertinent discussion on published content through hierarchical comment sorting.
Version Control System – Traces content updates for information about what was changed, when and by whom. You can enable the comment log to keep notes on each file and roll-back content to an earlier version. This is particularly beneficial for systems being edited by more than one user.
Blogger API Support – Allows for more comprehensive editing of your site by enabling your site to be updated by different online or non-web browser based tools.
News Aggregator – Reads content and blogging news from other sites and has a feature that prevents loosing track of your news if you’re offline for a few days.
Perma Link – A permanent link is created for each URL to avoid possible broken links.
Ping - Notifies interested sites that your site has changed.
Analysis, Tracking and Statistics – Web-based reports can be accessed which contain statistical information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate your site.
Discussion forums – A comprehensive feature that helps create lively, dynamic community sites.
Profiles- A customizable form created by an administrator to collect user information that appears within a user’s “My Account” page. The profile can be visible to the entire community of users; a feature often enabled for social networking sites.
Content translation – Posts can be set to automatically be translated to a user’s language; allowing for a more user-friendly international discussion of forum topics.
Locale - You can utilize this feature to display your site in a language other than English (the default), to built a multi-lingual site or to replace content with text which has been customized for your site. This feature automatically translates text which needs to be displayed. If a translation is not directly available, you can use the integrated web interface to view untranslated strings of text and specify their translations or you can import existing editable translations for your language, as GNU gettext Portable Object files.
Caching - This feature can be regulated in real time when your site is under load to reduce database queries and boost performance by minimizing the server's load.
Throttle - A congestion control mechanism that automatically detects when the number of anonymous or authenticated users exceeds a specific threshold and temporarily disables CPU-intensive functions to prevent the system from being overwhelmed. You can customize which functions you would like to disable, most commonly high bandwidth images and complicated logic as well as setting the threshold limit.
The perfect solution to your business needs
This software is infinitely scalable and highly customizable to suit businesses of any size and of any discipline. Thousands of websites world-wide use it. Intranet/Corporate Web Sites like AOL Corporate and Yahoo! Research sustain their internal and external web sites with Drupal; benefiting from its flexible permissions system and its simple web based publishing. Art and music sites like MTV United Kingdom and Warner Brothers records use Drupal because it supplies a concrete foundation necessary to create multimedia rich websites and allows users to share, distribute, rate, and discuss their work with others of similar interest. Call us today so we can show you all the unique solutions we can provide you to help your web campaign reach its full potential.
* The information supplied above was furnished directly from or is directly based on information from www.drupal.org