Drupal: the powerful
content management system
with the funky name
James Walker & Jeff Eaton

What’s Drupal, now?
• Helps you manage your site’s content.
• Thousands of feature plugins.
• Skinnable by designers.
• 100% Free: open source software!
• What’s not to love?

Drupal’s History
• Built in 2000 by Belgians
• Released as open source in 2001
• Used by Dean campaign in 2004
• Now used on trillions of sites

Memory lane: HTML
about.html index.html news.html
Folders full of HTML files, requested one by one.
Simple — until you have 1000 pages...

Memory lane: Scripts
guestbook.cgi index.html news.asp
Scripts the handle similar content and
interactive sections: great, but still scattered

Today: web applications!
index.php
Central system handles all functionality
and content. One tool to rule them all!

That’s Drupal!

How Drupal Works
• I’m the user, I want a page.
• I’m Drupal. What URL do you want?
• I’m a plugin. I handle that URL.
• I’m Drupal, I add sidebars and menus and…
• I’m a theme, I turn that stuff into HTML
• I’m the user… thanks for the web page!

Theme (XHTML, CSS — design)
Views of content (blog, calendar, gallery)
Content (blog posts, news, wiki pages)
Users (editors, administrators, plebians)
Modules
Drupal Core (login, search, security, etc.)

How does it compare?
Frameworks give
developers tools to build
web sites from scratch.

How does it compare?
Web Apps are focused
on specific kinds of sites:
blogging, photo gallery,
education support

How does it compare?
Content Management Systems
give users tools to structure
sites, often rely on plugins to
add specific features.

Drupal content: Nodes!
• Different types of content
• Modules define content types
• Different properties
• Different permissions
• All goes into a big bin! Blog post
Calendar Event Poll
Cat Picture

How to show content?

How to show content?
• Blog: Organize by user and date
• Calendar: Show in a table, by date
• Forum: Summarize by “topic”
• Taxonomy: Organize by related keywords
• Wiki: Don’t organize! ;-)

But what if I want...
• Drupal lets you create content types
• CCK let you add bits to them
• Views lets you build custom listings
• Other modules add random crazy coolness.

Thousands of modules
Third-party Integration
Administration
Search
Multilingual Games Events/Calendars
User management Security
Advertising
Media Voting and Rating
Presentation Ecommerce
Social Networking/Groups

In Summary
• Drupal manages content, lets
you structure your site
• Modules can add custom
features to Drupal
• Themes can customize the
HTML that’s generated
• Questions!