7 Things You Should Know About Drupal
1. What is it?
Drupal is a highly configurable and extensible open-source Content Management System (CMS) . It can fulfill a wide variety of need from simple websites, so complex community or ecommerce websites.
2. Who's doing it?
Drupal is used on countless websites from enthusiasts to small communities and businesses, to the entertainment industry , academics, and government.
At OSU departments such as Mechanical Engineering have adopted Drupal as their CMS of choice. Also the recent reorganization of several departments into the Colleges of the Arts and Sciences has led to the adoption of Drupal as a means to standardize and convert approximately 150 existing websites.
3. How does it work?
Drupal is a PHP based system with a MySQL or PostgreSQL database back-end. It has a highly extensible, modular design that provides a framework of hooks which allow developers to alter the execution of many common processes in the system, or add entirely new functionality.
4. Why is it significant?
Drupal has a user base of hundreds of thousands, and has grown in popularity over the past decade. The software has reached a state of maturity which makes it a viable option for the delivery of web-based content among communities of designers and developers.
5. What are the downsides?
Drupal is a product of a reasonably well-abstracted solution to many common web needs. Therefore it is highly configurable and capable of being applied to many purposes. High configurability leads to complexity which in turn results in a steep learning curve before a developer can employ Drupal effectively.
Drupal began in the pre-PHP 5 era, meaning that much of its codebase has a far more procedural framework. Drupal at present, although possessing some aspects of object-oriented programming, is not truly object-oriented. Drupal, essentially, has a dated programming design which puts many developers off.
Drupal's interface is not necessarily user-friendly, although some strides have been made on this subject in recent versions of Drupal.
6. Where is it going?
The Drupal foundation is responding to competitive forces among CMS development to create a more user-friendly interface. This new interface has been added in the most recent version of Drupal.
7. What are the implications for teaching?
The broad use of CMS systems such as Drupal is reshaping how web content is delivered. This represents a significant shift in how students heading towards a career in design or development need to approach the modern web.