Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including: Community web portals, Discussion sites, Corporate web sites, Intranet applications, Personal web sites or blogs, Aficionado sites, E-commerce applications, Resource directories, Social Networking sites.
Drupal can be set up and ready to use in minutes, because it provides an easy to use installer.
Here are some key features of "Drupal":
· Collaborative Book - Our unique collaborative book feature lets you setup a "book" and then authorize other individuals to contribute content.
· Friendly URLs - Drupal uses Apache's mod_rewrite to enable customizable URLs that are both user and search engine friendly.
· Modules - The Drupal community has contributed many modules which provide functionality that extend Drupal core.
· Online help - Like many Open Source projects, we can't say that our online help is perfect but have built a robust online help system built into the core help text. Available to you on your own site.
· Open source - The source code of Drupal is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License 2 (GPL). Unlike proprietary blogging or content management systems, Drupal's feature set is fully available to extend or customize as needed.
· Personalization - A robust personalization environment is at the core of Drupal. Both the content and the presentation can be individualized based on user-defined preferences.
· Role based permission system - Drupal administrators don't have to tediously setup permissions for each user. Instead, they assign permissions to roles and then group like users into a role group.
· Searching - All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times if you take advantage of the built in search module.
· User authentication - Users can register and authenticate locally or using an external authentication source like Jabber, Blogger, LiveJournal or another Drupal website. For use on an intranet, Drupal can integrate with an LDAP server.
· Polls - Drupal comes with a poll module which enables admins and/or users to create polls and show them on various pages.
· Templating - Drupal's theme system separates content from presentation allowing you to control the look and feel of your Drupal site. Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP coding meaning that you don't have to learn a proprietary templating language.
· Threaded comments - Drupal provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum.
· Version control - Drupal's version control system tracks the details of content updates including who changed it, what was changed, the date and time of changes made to your content and more. Version control features provide an option to keep a comment log and enables you to roll-back content to an earlier version.
· Blogger API support - The Blogger API allows your Drupal site to be updated by many different tools. This includes non-web browser based tools that provide a richer editing environment.
· Content syndication - Drupal exports your site's content in RDF/RSS format for others to gather. This lets anyone with a News Aggregator browse your Drupal sites feeds.
· News aggregator - Drupal has a powerful built-in News Aggregator for reading and blogging news from other sites. The News Aggregator caches articles to your MySQL database and its caching time is user configurable.
· Permalinks - All content created in Drupal has a permanent link or "perma link" associated with it so people can link to it freely without fear of broken links.
· Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X support - Drupal was designed from the start to be multi-platform. Not only can you use it with either Apache or Microsoft IIS but we also have Drupal running on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms.
· Database independence - While many of our users run Drupal with MySQL, we knew that MySQL wasn't the solution for everyone. Drupal is built on top of a database abstraction layer that enables you to use Drupal with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Other SQL databases can be supported by writing a supporting database backend containing fourteen functions and creating a matching SQL database scheme.
· Multi-language - Drupal is designed to meet the requirements of an international audience and provides a full framework to create a multi-lingual website, blog, content management system or community application. All text can be translated using a graphical user interface, by importing existing translations, or by integrating with other translation tools such as the GNU gettext.
· Analysis, Tracking and Statistics - Drupal can print browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate your site.
· Logging and Reporting - All important activities and system events are captured in an event log to be reviewed by an administrator at a later time.
· Web based administration - Drupal can be administered entirely using a web browser, making it possible to access it from around the world and requires no additional software to be installed on your computer.
· Discussion forums - Full discussion forum features are built into Drupal to create lively, dynamic community sites.
· Caching - The caching mechanism eliminates database queries increasing performance and reducing the server's load. Not only can the caching be tuned in real time, while your site is under load, but it has been successfully tested under a "slashdotting" and performed extremely well.
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
Changes to 6.14:
· Only check the db prefix for simpletest if it was a string (not running a multisite)
· DISTINCT handling in db_distinct_field()'s MySQL implementations was resulting in bogus queries
· drupal_urlencode() and Drupal.encodeURIComponent was used to encode query strings and other components it should not have been used for
· Drupal lacked support for positive integer values in database queries, beyond PHP_INT_MAX; caused issues with twitter integration and big numbers in general
· Document type argument on action_save()
· Incorrectly documented parameter name on flood_is_allowed()
· Missing phpdoc @code tags on PHP code examples in form.inc and actions.inc
· Better documentation on how the cid and wildcard arguments interact on cache_clear_all()
· theme_admin_block_content() had wrong argument name documented
· node.tpl.php mistakenly mentions theme_user(); should reference theme_username() instead
· Only add Content-Length if we actually have any content or if it is a POST or PUT request.
· Fix named entity handling in filter_xss(), so it does not clash with other entities and result in wrong encoding
· MODULE_preprocess_maintenance_page() functions were never called, even if the database is online
· drupal_clear_css_cache() should not be called on all invocations to the themes admin page; should be called only on submit - consistent with the modules admin page
· Garland mistakenly used phptemplate_comment_wrapper() to override comment-wrapper.tpl.php; should use a preprocess function instead to complement the core comment-wrapper.tpl.php
Changes to 5.20:
· Per-table cache_flush variables to avoid not flushing all but the first table when multiple tables are cleared.
· taxonomy_term_path() and its phpdoc block was separated by one blank line, thus disconnecting it for the API docs parser.
· Deny D6-style access elements.
· Create temporary mysql tables in memory.
· Fix login destination again on 403/404 pages and make the search form work there if displayed
· As of December, 2007, Venezuela is GMT/UTC-0430, but that timezone was not in the list of our supported zones
· Fix issue with disappearing Garland tabs in Internet Explorer
· Patch: XML-RPC error handling was incomplete.