25-08-2017, 09:32 PM
Drupal - Open Source CMS
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INTRODUCTION
In its simplest form, a CMS is a software package that provides tools for authoring, publishing, and managing content on a website. “Content” is anything from a news story, a blog post, a video, a photograph, a podcast, an article, or a description of a product that you are selling. In more general terms, content is any combination of text, graphics, photographs, audio, and video that represent something that visitors to your site will read, watch, and hear.
A web content management system (WCMS or Web CMS) is a content management system (CMS) software, usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A CMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions. Some content management systems are free, such as Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. Others may be affordable based on size subscriptions.
A CMS typically provides a number of features that simplify the process of building, deploying, and managing websites, including the following:
INTRODUCTION TO DRUPAL
Drupal is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) and content management framework (CMF) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal stems from a project by a Dutch university student, Dries Buytaert. The goal of the project was to provide a mechanism for Buytaert and his friends to share news and events. Buytaert turned Drupal into an open source project in 2001, and the community readily embraced the concept and has expanded on its humble beginnings, creating what is now one of the most powerful and feature-rich CMS platforms on the web.
Individuals, teams, and communities leverage Drupal’s features to easily publish, manage, and organize content on a variety of websites, ranging from personal blogs to large corporate and government sites. It is used as a back-end system for at least 2.1% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.
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, page layout customization, and system administration. The Drupal core installation can be used as a brochureware website, a single- or multi-user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for user-generated content.
HISTORY OF DRUPAL
Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board, Drupal became an open source project in 2001. Drupal is an English rendering 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") for its community aspects, but mistyped it when checking the domain name and thought the error sounded better.
Interest in Drupal got a significant boost in 2003, when it was used to build "DeanSpace" for Howard Dean, one of the candidates in the U.S. Democratic Party's primary campaign for the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Developed initially by Dean campaign volunteers Zack Rosen and Neil Drumm, DeanSpace used open source sharing of Drupal to support a decentralized network of approximately 50 disparate, unofficial pro-Dean web sites that communicated directly with one another as well as with the Dean campaign. Although Dean eventually lost the presidential primary race to John Kerry, his campaign achieved unprecedented success at using the internet for fundraising. After Dean ended his campaign, Rosen and Drumm continued to pursue their interest in developing a community-building web platform that could aid political campaigns and activism by launching CivicSpace Labs in July 2004, "the first company with full-time employees that was developing and distributing Drupal technology." CivicSpace operated for several years before closing, and by then several other companies had emerged that specialized in Drupal development. By 2012, the Drupal website listed more than 100 vendors that offer Drupal-related services.
Website with Static Content
Drupal is a great tool for creating traditional websites that have a relatively static set of content. The core release of Drupal allows you to create as many unique pages as you like. Drupal also gives you the opportunity to set any particular page you create as the home page.
Website with Dynamic Content
In addition to static pages, the core Drupal release allows you to create a blog, upload file attachments and aggregate content from other sites. It's easy to add a blog or news updates to your static content. You could upload and share press releases or other company documents. You can pull in news that relates to your site from an RSS feed by using the aggregator module. People can subscribe to your dynamic content by utilizing one of the many RSS feeds made available by the system.
Single or Multi-Author Blog
The Drupal blog module allows each site user to have a blog. Even if the site has only one author, Drupal contains great features that allow you to get the full experience. Each blog has its own RSS feed for easy subscription via a feed reader. Drupal allows you to freely add tags to each post, which you can display as a cloud using the tagadelic module. Good spam protection is available as well. You can require that visitors sign up before commenting. Or you can use the Captcha, Mollom or Spam modules to provide stronger spam protection.