Hello today and welcome to my blog side of Netgills. As usual, I’m gonna be writing a little review and some basics about a particular but powerful Software that bears “Drupal.” Depending on your accent, but based on mine, I usually pronounce it as “Droop-Hull” If you may wonder what this is, its just another Content management system by name.
“Wow. Drupal again, after WordPress…Joomla! Well, I don’t give a damn.!”
If that’s your thought dude, you’ve gotta change that mentality because this is another super powerful CMS out of the box manufactured to you and me to use for whatever we might wanna use it for. Well, lemme make things clearer by telling a lil story about this software.
Drupal Brief History.
Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board , Drupal became an open source project in 2001. The name Drupal represents an English rendering of the Dutch word “druppel “, which means “drop” (as in “a
water droplet”). The name came from the now-defunct Drop.org Web site, 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. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal
core, contains basic features common to content management systems. These include user account registration and maintenance, menu management, RSS feeds, taxonomy, page layout customization, and system
administration. The Drupal core installation can serve as a simple Web site, a single- or multi- user blog, an Internet forum, or a community Web site providing for user-generated content . As of April 2015, the Drupal community has provided more than 31,000 contributed modules. Such modules alter and extend the core capabilities, behavior, and appearance of a Drupal site. The Drupal community comprises more than one million members (as of October 2013) and 31,000 Developers (as of February 2014). “The Drupal Overview”, a feature of the project web site, describes it as a content management framework. Drupal also describes itself as a Web application framework, as it meets the generally accepted [ by whom? ] feature requirements for such frameworks. Although Drupal offers a sophisticated application programming interface for developers, basic Web site installation and administration of the framework require no programming skills. Drupal runs on any computing platform that supports both a Web server capable of running PHP and a database to store content and configuration.
What is it really?
Well, if you asking yourself that question, I think the history has already settled some of your Inquisition. But in case you might want to know more, I will write briefly here.
Drupal is like a Content Management Framework on which the core functionality can be extended hassle free. Since there are more thousands of free and open source Modules at the Drupal repository, this has always being easy.
Drupal therefore can be used or adapted into any project making it therefore easy for a webmaster, developer to develop an integrating tool with it and other software.
Using is very straightforward and the integration into projects is easy and fast too.
What can Drupal be used for?
That question depends on your very point of view. Your point of view depends in your project. Being a powerful framework-like tool, the CMS simply becomes a terminal for power supply for every extensions extending the core functionality of the software. This simply means that Drupal’s usage is unlimited. A very brief list of these are:
1.) Social Networking
2.) E-Commerce and Marketplace
3.) E-Learning platform
4.) Blogging tool
5.) Forum tool
6.) Review and Rating tool
7.) Download/Upload platform
8.) Question and Answer tool
And many more….
The Advantages:
Using Drupal is one of the most brilliant decision in developing. The software which has a great multitude of community behind it making the job speed up and support team has made the software a thing to reckon with. Since it’s a versatile tool, it can easily be adapted into anything.
The Disadvantages:
Modules depends on modules….This is what I personally hate about Drupal. Drupal is made in such a way like “We ain’t opening everything for you totally, you better go download the rest here.” This makes a single project needs a huge bunch of modules to extend the function of a particular module. This therefore slows down load time and ones one of the code of a module is malfunctioning, the entire module might give up on the project. Having to back up every time you wanna upload and activate a module is a great palaver.
Drupal Vs the Rest (WordPress & Joomla)
Well, for WordPress, Drupal being a CMS lacks some basics that makes it a fullfledged CMS like WordPress. This makes it line up behind WordPress. And competing against Joomla too is something Drupal might be up to but depends on how smart your skills are in handling errors which the two might throw to you. But better still, Joomla still prevail over Drupal despite having to withdraw some dollar to download just a mere commenting tool something which isn’t fair. Drupal in this wise is quiet easier to use than Joomla and quiet flexible than the latter but the core remains the core. In security aspects, Drupal is very secured and helps control spam with the Aqua System called Mollom a great software that catches spams and spammers.
No | Reviews | Drupal | WordPress | Joomla |
1 | Reliability | 90% | 99% | 94% |
2 | Durability | 95% | 100% | 93% |
3 | Security | 94% | 96% | 92% |
4 | Flexibility | 91% | 99% | 90% |