Drupal Hosting
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. It is used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% 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.
As of August 2011 there are more than 11,000 free community-contributed add-ons, known as contrib modules, available to alter and extend Drupal’s core capabilities and add new features or customize Drupal’s behavior and appearance. Because of this plug-in extensibility and modular design, Drupal is sometimes described as a content management framework. Drupal is also described as a web application framework, as it meets the generally accepted feature requirements for such frameworks.
Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.
Drupal runs on any computing platform that supports both a web server capable of running PHP (including Apache, IIS, lighttpd, and nginx) and a database such as MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB or Microsoft SQL Server to store content and settings. Drupal 6 requires PHP 4.4.0+ while Drupal 7 requires PHP 5.2 or higher.
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.
A community now helps develop Drupal, and Drupal’s popularity is growing rapidly. From May 2007 to April 2008, Drupal was downloaded from the Drupal.org website more than 1.4 million times, an increase of approximately 125% from the previous year.
As of July 2010, hundreds of well-known organizations use Drupal, including corporations, media & publishing companies, governments, non-profits, schools, and individuals. An estimated 7.2 million sites used Drupal As of July 2010. Drupal also won several Packt Open Source CMS Awards and three times (in a row) won the Webware100.
