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Comparing DrupalTaking a look at Drupal for your Open
Source CMS platform.
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Understanding Drupal: The official explanationDrupal is open source social publishing software that empowers individuals, teams, and communities to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.
It offers flexibility through vetted systems and tools that empower users to leverage previous community successes through modules and create unlimited new functionalities with a flexible architecture.
Drupal was also designed to allow third parties to create and customize new features and behaviors through APIs
The Drupal framework offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, but few programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.
Drupal is written in PHP and can run on any platform that supports:• a web server capable of running PHP (version 4.3.5+), including Apache and IIS• OS: Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X • a database, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, to store content and settings.
Source: Idealware report
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Understanding Drupal: The layman’s translation
Drupal is an open source CMS with a social flare (read: web 2.0 pre-wired)
It is flexible and lets you steal work others have done and pass it off as your own.
Developers can do really cool things with Drupal.
Its hard if you want it to be, but most of you will just see the easy stuff
It works on everything your IT guys run – even Windows!
Source: Idealware report
blogs /wikis
forums / comments
ratings
tagging
users
social networks
workflow
taxonomy
search
RSS
content
analytics
ContentMgmtSystems
SocialSoftware
Tools
SocialPublishingSystems
Source:
Social Publishing Software Participation-Driven Websites
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Drupal Community and SupportThe Drupal community is a key differentiating factor for its success
The Drupal community has built such a strong foundation of collaboration and support that “tens of thousands of people and organizations have chosen to use Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including community web portals, corporate web sites, social networking sites, personal web sites or blogs, and much more.”
> 2,000,000 Total Drupal downloads
> 200,000 Downloads per month
> 350,000 Community members
> 2,021 Developers
>300,000 Live Drupal websites
> 4,000 Drupal modules
741 Contributors to Drupal 6
Source:
Idealware Comparison Chart
Source: Idealware: Comparing Open Source CMS
Is Drupal for You? A CMS Matrix ComparisonDrupal Joomla! WordPress Plone
Barriers to entry Medium Low Low High
Language PHP PHP PHP Python
Structural Flexibility High Medium Low High
Multi-site Management Ability High Medium Low High
Extensions/Plug-ins High Medium High Low
Ease of Hosting High High High Low
Functionality (Out-of-the-box) Medium Low High Low
Scalability & Security Medium Medium Medium High
Investment Expense Low Low Low High
Source: CMS Matrix
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Performance/Reliability: Dozens of major publishers turn to Drupal and tens of thousands of high traffic sites because it is an enterprise class platform
Ease/Expense of Implementation: development shops worldwide find they can be as efficient as anyone and this platform and use is as their preferred technology.
Evolving Technology Extensibility: You need something modular/extensible that allows you to add new features easily and it is all possible with Drupal.
Easier Modular Enhancements: Drupal's architecture is modular and integrates well without requiring customization to core components that would make them difficult to maintain.
Why we use Drupal
Large Community Support: You need a community that is active, robust, responsive and growing. We are involved in the Drupal community and have an ear to the ground on features and changes that would affect your site.
Easy Staff Training: The Drupal CMS is intuitive and we are well versed in training others to use it. To support training, there are numerous videos, online tutorials, local classes and even books on how it works.
Decreased Support Costs: Organizations find they can do a lot more themselves and when they do need help, the time is a fraction of what a proprietary CMS would cost for similar changes.
Node: a primary unit of content. It has a unique URL given by the system. It can also be given a custom URL as well (an "alias," if you turn on the Path module).
When people refer to "a node" all they mean is a piece of content stored within Drupal. A node could be a poll, a story, an image, a book page, etc.
Nodes belong to a "content type." The "Page" and "Story" content types come set up in the default installation. Many more can be added. And with the help of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) you can extend the number and types of fields for each content type.
Nodes can have taxonomy terms (categories) applied to it, files attached to it, and be extended in many ways.
Source: Drupal.org
Key Drupal Terms: Content
Module: software (code) that extends Drupal features and/or functionality.
Core modules are those included with the main download of Drupal.
Contributed (or "contrib") modules are available for separate download from the modules section of downloads.
Modules can be written to do just about anything in Drupal without modifying the core functionality.
Source: Drupal.org
Key Drupal Terms: Code
Theme: is the way your site is displayed to the end-user. The graphic look, layout and colors of Drupal sites are defined by the themes.
Block: a method for positioning data within a page. Blocks contains content, like a node, but is conceived of as lighter weight and is not as flexible as a node. Blocks are often positioned in the sidebars of a web site.
Menu: a list of links. Menus become available as blocks after they are created. The look of menus are typically controlled by theme.
Views: A contributed module which allows site developers a simple graphical interface for modifying the presentation of content. Views permits selection of specific fields and filters for what to display (ie. list, full nodes, teasers, etc.)
Source: Drupal.org
Key Drupal Terms: User Interface
Source: Drupal.org
Drupal Layers: Architecture (or is it Marketecture?)
Read about and understand: * Preprocessing * How hooks work * Callbacks * FAPI * Taxonomy * Overall structure
Know the difference between: * node * region * block * view * theme * menu
Check out these modules: * views * pathauto * cck * flag * imagecache * devel
Source: Phase2 Agile Approach Blog
Tips for Developers
Drupal is developer friendly and promotes code sharing. While, hacking core is bad, exploring it to understand how things work is good. Drupal developers are open to having others digging through their modules to find out how it works—don't be afraid to dive in.
It is advisable to start simply and research existing modules and tools. Starting out on a project, much of what is needed has already been done. Use what Drupal provides for a reliable project in record time.
