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!