Drupal is a free, open source Content Management System (CMS), written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal is the 3rd most popular CMS behind WordPress and Joomla and is used by least 2.3% of all web sites worldwide (over 1,000,000 sites). Drupal is used by fewer sites than WordPress but more high traffic sites, such as The Economist, Weather.com, Nasdaq, FastCompany, The Washington Post, Martha Stewart, Warner Brothers, United Nations, and MTV.
Founded in 2001 by Dries Buytaert, the name Drupal refers to the Dutch word for Village and Drupal is seen as one of the best CMSs for creating community websites.
According to Wikipedia: “As of April 2017, the Drupal community is composed of more than 1.3 million members, including 106,650 users actively contributing, resulting in more than 37,110 free modules that extend and customize Drupal functionality, over 2,445 free themes that change the look and feel of Drupal, and at least 1,116 free distributions that allow users to quickly and easily set up a complex, use-specific Drupal in fewer steps.
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.
Drupal also describes itself as a Web application framework. When compared with notable frameworks Drupal meets most of the generally accepted feature requirements for such web frameworks. Although Drupal offers a sophisticated API for developers, basic Website 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.”
