Drupal in the present time, the most sophisticated CMS (Content
Management System) on Internet. It's popular all over the world. It's
main advantage is wide social network, which is still improving the
system, and provides personalisation and security.. Its interface has
made it possible for people with no knowledge of coding, to develop
web-pages. Drupal is under GNU General Public License 2 (GPL) and
contains a large amount of additional modules and themes. It's
installation is very simple and the homepage Drupal.org includes
information ranging from global news to useful tutorials which helps
beginners and advanced users on how to sort out any problem that arise
while developing the pages. Anyone can access the huge Drupal API and
take a look inside the core of the system.
The core is written in
PHP and cooperates with MySQL or PostgreSQL database engines. Drupal
core works on a modular approach. There are a variety of other modules.
Developers can simply download a module, copy it into the Drupal site
and install it within the administration. Every module has its own
functionality.
Main Purpose
The aim of Drupal is to be the powerful engine of websites, which can
simply build and handle every user. Drupal is still on the way, however
the awaiting version 6.0 will provide lots of new features and
improvements. This new version will make Drupal accessible to regular
users. Drupal is now able to be extended by official modules to a
variety of website types from a simple web-log to extensive e-shop or a
huge application.
Requirements
CMS Drupal is easy to install on most of the hosting programs. Its
minimal requirements are: Web server, the best choice is Apache PHP
version 4.3.3 and higher MySQL version at least 4.0 or PostgreSQL at
least 7.0. Database user has to be allowed to CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES
and LOCK TABLES. Some modules require .htaccess file and mod_rewrite
support.
Security
Drupal
is as secure and sometimes more secure than any other competitive
commercial offering. It built on set of API that mitigate common
security risks.
Drupal addresses the OWASP(Open Web application Security
Projects-https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_page) top 10 security
risks:
SQL Injection Hacks
Cross site scripting
Broken authentication and session management
Insecure direct object reference
Cross site request forgery
Security misconfiguration
failure to restrict URL access
Non-validated redirects and forwards
Insecure cryptographic storage
Insufficient transport layer Protection
(To
determine the stack that a site runs on you can visit the site and view
the technology profile using the 'built with' add-on for Firefox.)
Drupal's flexible architecture
Drupal
provides Web developers several pre-built components to get started and
a set of tools to build a comprehensive content management solution. In
short,Drupal provides a set of building blocks to web developer to
rapidly assemble a site solution.
This
makes it possible for the web development team to simultaneously make
changes to several functions of the site without affecting the other
development teams ability to propagate their changes.
Ease of administration
Every visitor who lands on your website is considered a 'user' by Drupal.
To
differentiate between types of users and determine their entitlements
on the site,all those who have a user ID in Drupal are non-anonymous
users and those who don't are called anonymous users. You can create
various classes of users by defining roles and assigning users to them.
You can then assign permissions to these roles so that users who are
assigned those roles inherit those permissions.
Adding contents to site is as easy as sending out an email. provide a
title and body of the contents, click 'Save' and your content is
published. When you create content, you can choose to include an image
,ask Drupal to automatically create a menu link, provide a URL path
where the page is accessible,decide to accept comments from
visitors,etc. You can also decide to publish the page or save it as a
draft to revisit it at later date.
However ,don't let this ease mislead you into thinking that Drupal
doesn't provide enough for the power user. You can build you site's
functionality by enabling contributed modules. There are modules
available for almost every aspect of a site's functionality,like:
actions,work flows and triggers
CRM system
Advertising and commerce
Events
Search engine optimization
and
many more. If you at any time feel that these modules fall short of
providing you the features you require,you can roll out your own module.
Not really impressed ?Well,then you can create a new Drupal
distribution if you wish. A Drupal distribution includes the Drupal core
along with themes,modules,libraries and installation profile. At the
time of writing this,there were no other CMSs that allowed you to do
this.
Developing for mobile devices
Drupal provides a layer of abstraction between native mobile
apps(residing on the devide) and the Drupal CMS. Mobile apps can talk to
Drupal using the 'services' module to fetch content, validate
users,execute business logic,etc. If you instead wish to develop a web
app that resides on your Web server,you can integrate it with the Drupal
theme layers. You can use any of the available libraries like JQTouch,
Jo, jqMobi,etc.
If you are planning on building a site for a specific device,there are
module to detect your visitors device and redirect then to the
respective URLs.
Several organisations across industry segments have built their sites
on Drupal. Case studies can be found on the Drupal.org website at https://drupal.org/case-studies.
These sites cover everything from the art, travel to hospitality. These
studies describe the challenges and provide solution on how to tackle
the complexities of building a complex websites.
Considering that Drupal provides several of the building blocks
required to assemble a site, the depth of the knowledge available and
the large user community ,it is worthwhile considering the Drupal
platform for your next corporate site or web solution.
Pratik Dhanave
Firefox Student Ambassador
PICT,Pune
