Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a web site.
Artopa specializes in developing web sites using the open-source content management platform Drupal because of it's flexibility, extensibility and strong developer support.
Drupal excels as a platform for news sites and other communities where stories are provided by the audience. Incoming stories are automatically voted upon by the readers and the best stories are promoted to the home page. Submissions with poorer quality or of lesser interest are hidden after enough negative votes.
Due to its strong networking, collaborative, and community capabilities, Drupal is a powerful choice for grassroots political campaigns.
Drupal is great for newspapers and other news organizations.
Drupal flourishes when it powers a portal web site where one person shares their expertise and enthusiasm for a topic.
Companies maintain their internal and external web sites in Drupal. Drupal works well for these uses because of its flexible permissions system, and its easy web based publishing. No longer do you have to wait for a webmaster to get the word out about your latest project.
If you want a central directory for a given topic, Drupal suits your needs well. Users can register and suggest new resources while editors can screen their submissions.
When you begin using Drupal, you join a large international community of users and developers. Thanks to the localization features within Drupal, there are many Drupal sites implemented in a wide range of languages.
Drupal can be used for creating dynamic learning communities to supplement the face-to-face classroom or as a platform for distance education classes. Academic professional organizations benefit from its interactive features and the ability to provide public content, member-only resources, and member subscription management.
When it comes to community art sites, Drupal is a great match. No other platform provides the rock solid foundation that is needed to make multimedia rich web sites that allow users to share, distribute, and discuss their work with others. As time goes on, Drupal will only develop stronger support for audio, video, images, and playlist content for use in multimedia applications.
Drupal is great for a personal web site where the owner can keep a blog, publish photos, and maintain a collection of links.
Drupal uses standards-compliant methods such as XHTML, separation of content and layout through CSS and clean URLs to make sites accessible and to improve search engine ranking.
Drupal uses a database abstraction layer with support for several engines such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. Along with support for database table prefixes, Drupal has been extensively tested under high loads (such as a "Slashdot effect") and also includes built-in throttling and caching for optimal performance.
The source code of Drupal is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License 2 (GPL). Unlike proprietary blogging or content management systems, Drupal's feature set is fully available to extend or customize as needed.
There is an active developer and user community that participates in mailing lists, forums, and IRC. Several consultants also offer paid support and development using Drupal, and several ISPs specialize in hosting Drupal sites. This means that your site is not tied to one developer or one hosting solution like you would with a custom in-house CMS.
Drupal has been in continuous development for over three years. The same group of primary developers refines and improves the code and encourages more people to create additional modules, contribute patches, and write vital documentation. The growing momentum is evidenced by many new web sites and projects committing to Drupal.
Drupal does much more than implement simple categories. Instead, Drupal's flexible taxonomy system allows creation of unlimited separate classification schemes. Each of these schemes can be arranged as a simple list, as a tree, or as a tree with interconnected branches. Administrators can choose different schemes to associate with each content type, and users may then browse tagged content by its taxonomy terms.
The book feature organizes content into a nested hierarchy. It is particularly well-suited for manuals, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), and user-contributed documentation. Comments may be posted to book pages, previous content revisions may be provided, and pages can be moved amongst the hierarchy at any time.
Drupal creates a syndicated RSS feed for others to gather with a "news aggregator," such as NetNewsWire or Feed-Demon. This allows your readers to view your latest content from the comfort of their desktop. Similarly, Drupal provides its own built-in web aggregator for reading and collecting news from other sites.
The Drupal interfaces can be translated to make your Drupal web site accessible in one or more languages.
The Drupal core is the glue that binds everything together. While Drupal modules focus on specific features, the core contains common functions such as content and user management. Thanks to the infrastructure provided by the core, modules integrate seamlessly into Drupal.
Drupal’s architecture is truly modular. Apart from a few core modules, all plug-ins can be switched on and off as required for the chosen setup.
Content from the Drupal Handbook's. Published under the Creative Commons License
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