Chapter 1. Introduction and Overview

Drupal is an open-source Content Management System (CMS), which can be used to create powerful, flexible websites that are easily configured and edited by the end users, who don't even need to know how to use HTML to harness its power. Using contributed modules to provide specialized functionality, you can use Drupal to create nearly any site that can be envisioned. Being scalable, it can be used to power anything from a community portal to a corporate network.

Drupal is the framework of choice for tens of thousands of developers and companies that build their sites based on Drupal. Drupal has been consistently rated among the top CMSs for several years.

Released as an open-source project in 2001 by its original creator, Dries Buytaert (http://buytaert.net/), it quickly attracted a strong community of developers and programmers. By now it is a mature and stable product that continues to evolve. With the release of Drupal 6 earlier this year, it remains a cutting-edge choice for website development.

Drupal is a database-driven dynamic web application built on PHP. As PHP is offered by most web hosts, as are MySQL and PostgreSQL, the database management systems supported by Drupal can be deployed from most server environments.

Also, Drupal encapsulates the database in an abstract layer so that the contributed modules may access data stored on the server without knowing the implementation procedure. This allows a site to be deployed from any of the wide array of servers, using MySQL or PostgreSQL, Apache or IIS, Linux or Windows, and many other options.

The end result is that a site built with Drupal can be expanded and enhanced, using plug-in contributed modules and custom themes to create a powerful and unique site. It is specifically these two facets (contributed modules and custom theming) that will be explored in detail throughout this book, obviously with an eye towards multimedia.

Because of the limited space and the availability of excellent resources, this book assumes you have some basic experience of using Drupal, and that you already know how to install it on a server. In fact, to get the most out of this book, you probably want to have a test installation to test some of the techniques and ideas presented here. Besides visiting Drupal.org, you can also find more help in the Resources Appendix of this book.