Drupal

Drupal is without doubt the best open source content management system on the planet. That gives you complete control over your website!

So what's Drupal? We've mentioned several times on the site, so here's a quick rundown on what Drupal is.

CMS

Drupal is a content managament system (CMS) and so it allows you, as a Drupal site owner, to login to the site and manage the content. That means you can add news articles, edit pages, decorate your site with images, change the menu structure...

Open Source

Open source means that there's a massive globals community of dedicated people contributing in every way to Drupal. From code through design and support, many thousands of people contribute to make Drupal the best that it can be.

At illuminate, we take open source seriously and contribute our time in the support forums to help other users make the most of the Drupal CMS. Our tracker on drupal.org is at https://www.drupal.org/user/238254/track although you probably need to be logged in to see it. You can easily create an account for yourself if you're interested.

Modular

One of the huge benefits of the Drupal CMS is it's modularity - this means that we can build up a website's look and feel as well as its functinoality in a very brick by brick manner. You can start small and build up later.

You could expand your site in many ways at any point during its lifetime:

  • Redesign without losing your content
  • Customise the design of particular pages - for example, your front page could look different to the rest of your site.
  • Add e-commerce facility
  • Add privacy to allow you to store private pages on the site that may be restricted to your staff or members only.

Awards

Drupal has won many awards over the last few years and that trend is set to continue with future versions of Drupal. Here's some of the awards Drupal has won recently.

2009

2008

2007

  • Webware 100
    https://drupal.org/node/152770
  • Packt Publishing Open Source CMS Awards:
    Best Overall Open Source CMS (1st place)
    Best PHP Open Source Content Management System (2nd place)
    Best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System (2nd place tie)

2006

  • Packt Publishing Open Source CMS Awards:
    Best Overall Open Source CMS (2nd place)