What is Drupal?
"Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world." -- from the Drupal web site, drupal.org
What does that mean?
Well, basically, Drupal is a software program that allows you to build and manage your web site and/or web application. Drupal does not need to be installed on your computer. It runs through any modern major web browser.
Drupal is written by a worldwide community of programmers. It is free to use to anyone who agrees and abides by the licensing agreement.
What can Drupal do?
Drupal is a very versatile program. It is programmed with modularity in mind. What does this mean? If you want a shopping cart for your web site, you install a shopping cart add-on module. If you want a calendaring functionality, you install the calendar add-on module. Oh and yes, most add-on modules are free to use to anyone who agrees and abides by the licensing agreement.
Imagine with Drupal and its modules you can build:
- an e-commerce web site like Gourmetbox
- a community web site like Porsche Club of America
- a social networking site like TrueLinked
- a government site like DC.gov
- a news web site like The Economist
Who uses Drupal?
From large to small, a lot of organizations use Drupal for their web needs.
Here is a short list of Drupal users:
- American Red Cross
- The Economist
- NBC
- Princess Cruises
- Tesla
- Warner Music Group
- and many more
To see more organizations using Drupal go to this web site - http://drupal.com/showcases