DRUPAL

Introduction:

Drupal is a free and open source modular framework and content management system (CMS) written in the programming language PHP.Like many modern CMSs, Drupal allows the system administrator to create and organize content, customize the presentation, automate administrative tasks, and manage site visitors and contributors.

Drupal is sometimes described as a "Content Management Framework"as its capabilities extend from content management to enabling a wide range of services and transactions. Although Drupal does offer a sophisticated programming interface, basic web site installation and administration can be accomplished with no programming.

Drupal runs in many environments, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris 10, OpenSolaris and any platform that supports either the Apache (version 1.3+), or IIS (version IIS5+) Web server and the PHP language (version 4.3.3+). Drupal requires a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL to store content and settings.

Drupal distributed under the GPL ("GNU General Public License") and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers.

HISTORY:

Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a bulletin board system, Drupal became an open source project in 2001. Drupal is an English transliteration 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,” referring to its community aspects), but made a typo when checking the domain name and thought it sounded better.

From May 2006 to April 2007, Drupal was downloaded from the Drupal.org website more than 600,000 times. A large community now helps develop Drupal.

As of July 2008, Drupal 6.3 is the latest release. 

Uses:

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including

Community web portals
Discussion sites
Corporate web sites
Intranet applications
Personal web sites or blogs
Aficionado sites
E-commerce applications
Resource directories
Social Networking sites

Drupal is ready to go from the moment you download it. It even has an easy-to-use web installer! 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.