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Drupal: the powerfulcontent 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
index.html news.htmlabout.html
Folders full of HTML files, requested one by one.Simple — until you have 1000 pages...
Memory lane: Scripts
index.htmlguestbook.cgi news.asp
Scripts the handle similar content andinteractive sections: great, but still scattered
Today: web applications!
index.php
Central system handles all functionalityand 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!
Content (blog posts, news, wiki pages)
Users (editors, administrators, plebians)
Modules
Drupal Core (login, search, security, etc.)
Theme (XHTML, CSS — design)
Views of content (blog, calendar, gallery)
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
Cat Picture
Calendar Event Poll
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
Administration
Games
Voting and Rating
Events/Calendars
Media
Social Networking/Groups
Search
Third-party Integration
User management Security
Presentation
Multilingual
Advertising
Ecommerce
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!