Drupal – a short historical overview

Drupal was started in 2000 by Dries Buytaert when he was a student at the University of Antwerp. Dries, along with some friends at the university, wanted a way to communicate about the various details of their lives. To meet that need, Dries wrote a web-based application that allowed people to share notes. In January 2001, Dries decided to release the source code, and the Drupal project was born.

The Drupal handbook provides a more detailed overview at http://drupal.org/about/history.

Drupal has gone through many improvements over the years, and as of the writing of this book, Drupal 7 is the most recent major version. It is the version we will be using in this book.