Drupal Features

Developer:	Drupal Association
License:	Free / Open Source
User Rating:	(4 votes)
Official Website:	www.drupal.org
Platform:	Web-based

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Drupal Review

Drupal is an open-source platform and content management system (CMS). Drupal was developed by Drupal Association. The software enables user to build dynamic web sites offering a broad range of features and services including user administration, publishing workflow, discussion capabilities, news aggregation, meta data functionalities using controlled vocabularies and XML publishing for content sharing purposes.

User can download Drupal for free from this CMS website.

Drupal Highlight Features:

• Collaborative Book – Lets user setup a “book” and then authorize other individuals to contribute content.
• Friendly URLs – Drupal uses Apache’s mod_rewrite to enable customizable URLs that are both user and search engine friendly.
• Modules – Comes with many modules that have contributed by Drupal community, which provide functionality that extend Drupal core.
• Online Help – Comes with built-in robust online help system on the core. Available to user on their own site.
• Open Source – The source code of Drupal is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License 2 (GPL).
• Personalization – A robust personalization environment is at the core of Drupal. Both the content and the presentation can be individualized based on user-defined preferences.
• Role-Based Permission System – Drupal administrators don’t have to tediously setup permissions for each user. Instead, they assign permissions to roles and then group like users into a role group.
• Searching – All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times if user take advantage of the built in search module.
• User Authentication – Users can register and authenticate locally or using an external authentication source like Jabber, Blogger, LiveJournal or another Drupal website. For use on an intranet, Drupal can integrate with an LDAP server.
• Polls – Comes with a poll module which enables admins and/or users to create polls and show them on various pages.
• Templating – Drupal’s theme system separates content from presentation allowing user to control the look and feel of their Drupal site. Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP coding.
• Threaded Comments – Provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum.
• Version Control – Drupal’s version control system tracks the details of content updates including who changed it, what was changed, the date and time of changes made to their content and more. Version control features provide an option to keep a comment log and enables user to roll-back content to an earlier version.
• Blogger API Support – The Blogger API allows Drupal site to be updated by many different tools. This includes non-web browser based tools that provide a richer editing environment.
• Content Syndication – Drupal exports user’s site’s content in RDF/RSS format for others to gather. This lets anyone with a News Aggregator browse their Drupal sites feeds.
• News Aggregator – Has a powerful built-in News Aggregator for reading and blogging news from other sites. It caches articles to user’s MySQL database and its caching time is user configurable.
• Permalinks – All content created in Drupal has a permanent link or “perma link” associated with it so people can link to it freely without fear of broken links.
• Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X support – Drupal was designed from the start to be multi-platform. Not only can user use it with either Apache or Microsoft IIS. Drupal also runs on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms.
• Database Independence – User can use Drupal with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Other SQL databases can be supported by writing a supporting database backend containing fourteen functions and creating a matching SQL database scheme.
• Multi-language – Drupal is designed to meet the requirements of an international audience and provides a full framework to create a multi-lingual website, blog, content management system or community application.
• Analysis, Tracking and Statistics – Display browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate the site.
• Logging and Reporting – All important activities and system events are captured in an event log to be reviewed by an administrator at a later time.
• Web based administration – Drupal can be administered entirely using a web browser, making it possible to access it from around the world and requires no additional software to be installed on their computer.
• Discussion forums – Full discussion forum features are built into Drupal to create lively, dynamic community sites.
• Caching – The caching mechanism eliminates database queries increasing performance and reducing the server’s load. Caching be tuned in real time and many high-traffic sites have performed very well under load.

User Experience with Drupal Software

To add more useful information for other users, if you ever experience using the Drupal program, I encourage you to write a short review about your experience with software and share it in the following section: