Drupal is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) with a large, supportive community. It’s used by millions of people and organizations around the globe to build and maintain their websites. You probably use Drupal every day without knowing it, as many top businesses and government organizations use Drupal, like the Government of Australia, Red Cross, Harvard, The Economist, BBC, NBC News, Whole Foods, Cisco, Twitter, and many, many more.
Drupal is open-source software released under the GNU Public License. This means it has inherent benefits–cost, flexibility, freedom, security, and accountability–that are unmatched by proprietary software. For example, Drupal is free to download and anyone can modify and extend the platform. This ensures freedom from vendor “lock in” and it empowers users worldwide to monitor Drupal’s underlying code for compliance and security issues and fix them quickly.
Full of features and highly customizable
Drupal shines as a CMS. It provides a user interface that allows you to create and publish your content easily. The platform accommodates unlimited content types, including text and media content, with highly customizable forms. It dynamically retrieves, filters, and presents this content with powerful, yet simple-to-use tools. There are also intuitive content creation tools and powerful in-place editing tools. Drupal controls access to content and features with its sophisticated user role classification and permissions system.
All of the administrative and end-user-facing functionality in Drupal, from fundamental features, such as the ability to log in or create content to dynamic photo galleries and complex voting systems, comes from modules. What you download from Drupal.org is what is referred to as “Drupal core” and it comes packed with all of the most commonly used modules to build a site, but there is a huge variety of contributed modules, which thousands of developers make available for free on Drupal.org.
Drupal is also a powerful website development platform. Drupal adheres to modern object-oriented programming patterns, PHP best practices, HTML5 and YAML standards. It also incorporates other great web technologies, including CKEditor, Symfony2, Twig, jQuery, Backbone.js, and Guzzle. Extending functionality and gaining complete control over the design is accomplished through a robust assortment of add-ons in the form of modules and themes.
