Koya University

School Of Computer

Software Engineering Department

Open Source Technology

A short report about

What is Drupal?

Prepared by Under Supervision Of

Kewan S. Salih Dr. Salah I. Yahiya

Introduction

A CMS or Content Management System is an application that can be used to manage and organize text, movies, pictures, links and many other types of data. Functionality varies from CMS to CMS, but most are web based and offer some sort of access

control. Many of the most popular websites in the world use free and publicly available CMS' like Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal [1]

In this essay we discuss shortly about Drupal Drupal is a free, open-source web development platform for online content and user

communities. Drupal powers some of the busiest sites on the web, and can be adapted to virtually any visual design. Drupal runs over a million sites, including

WhiteHouse.gov, World Economic Forum, Stanford University, and Examiner.com [2]

History

Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board, Drupal became an open

source project in 2001. Drupal is an English rendering of the Dutch word "druppel",

which means "drop" (as in "a water droplet"). The name was taken from the now-defunct

Drop.org website, whose code slowly evolved into Drupal. Buytaert wanted to call the

site "dorp" (Dutch for "village") for its community aspects, but mistyped it when checking

the domain name and thought the error sounded better.

Interest in Drupal got a significant boost in 2003, when it was used to build

"DeanSpace" for Howard Dean, one of the candidates in the U.S. Democratic Party's

primary campaign for the 2004 U.S. presidential election

Drupal is now developed by a community, and its popularity is growing rapidly. From

July 2007 to June 2008, Drupal was downloaded from the Drupal.org website more than

1.4 million times, an increase of approximately 125% from the previous year

As of December 2012, more than 808 000 sites are using Drupal [3]

Standard Drupal Features:

Drupal is highly modular; most of Drupal's user-visible features are written separately

from the codebase. This section lists the functionality provided by the modules included

in the latest Drupal release by default. The features provided by your Drupal system can

easily be expanded by adding or writing other modules [4]

Users (scalable user structure)

Forums

Blogs (per user or collective)

Articles

Static pages

Collective Book Writing.

Taxonomy (categories)

File-attachment on posts.

International interface translations.

Multi-language support.

Drupal Core

In the Drupal community, the term "core" means anything outside of the "sites" folder in

a Drupal installation. Drupal core is the stock element of Drupal. In its default

configuration, a Drupal website's content can be contributed by either registered or

anonymous users (at the discretion of the administrator) and is made accessible to web

visitors by a variety of selectable criteria. Drupal core also includes a

hierarchical taxonomy system, which allows content to be categorized or tagged with

key words for easier access.

Drupal maintains a detailed changelog of core feature updates by version

Drupal Core includes optional modules which can be enabled by the administrator to

extend the functionality of the core website. [3]

The core Drupal distribution provides a number of features, including:

statistics and logging

search , books, comments, forums, and polls

and feature throttling for improved performance URLs

-level menu system

-site support -user content creation and editing

OpenID support

profiles access control restrictions (user roles, IP addresses, email)

tools (triggers and actions)

Also Drupal core includes core themes, which customize the "look and feel" of Drupal

sites, for example, Garland and Bartik.

The Color Module, introduced in Drupal core 5.0, allows administrators to change the

color scheme of certain themes via a browser interface.[3]

Extending the core

Drupal core is modular, defining a system of hooks and callbacks, which are accessed

internally via an API, This design allows third-party contributed (often abbreviated to

"contrib") modules and themes to extend or override Drupal's default behaviors without

changing Drupal core's code.

Contributed modules offer image galleries, custom content types and content

listings, WYSIWYG editors, private messaging, third-party integration tools, and more.

As of November 2012 the Drupal website lists more than 19,600 free modules.

And contributed themes adapt or replace a Drupal site's default look and feel.

So the distribution of Drupal defines a packaged version of Drupal that upon installation

provides a website or application built for a specific purpose.

The distributions offer the benefit of a new Drupal site without having to manually seek

out and install third-party contrib modules or adjust configuration settings [3]

Drupal Community

Groups.drupal.org provides a place for groups to organize, meet, and work on projects

based on interest or geographic location. It's a great way to get involved, learn more

and get support.[5]

Drupal Security

Drupal has a very good track record in terms of security, and has an organized process

for investigating, verifying, and publishing possible security problems. Drupal’s security

team is constantly working with the community to address security issues as they arise.

More information about this process can be found in that section of the handbook. [6]

Localization

As of November 2012, Drupal had been made available in 91 languages

and English (the default). Support is included for right-to-left languages such

as Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew.[3]

Also Kurdish language added to translation pages and until now a group of kurditgroup

members, Works on translation Drupal to Kurdish language and waiting to others to

help them to speed up Working under this link

http://localize.drupal.org/translate/languages/ku

Websites using Drupal

http://www.law.stanford.edu/

http://www.actfl.org

Conclusion

In the end we can say that Drupal has some advantage as participate end user in

making and design a website easily ,freely at short time and make changes easily by

himself or call another one to improve ,change

References:

1. http://whatcms.org

2. http://www.acquia.com/what-is-drupal

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal

4. http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Drupal

5. http://drupal.org/community

6. http://drupal.org/documentation/is-drupal-secure