Drupal is a software platform that lets you create, manage, update and present any type of website, ranging from a simple personal website to advance one as a social networking site such as Facebook; it acts as a Content Management System (CMS). It is one of the best in its field with at least 3 % of the internet running on Drupal. Some examples are The White House, Harvard University, Yahoo, among many others. Website creation and maintenance are made easy with Drupal; it is easy to use -- even for layman's -- as no written coding is required. Every functionality one might imagine is ready to use and can be downloaded from the web as 'Modules' which already contain the necessary coding. In fact, Drupal CMS works in such a way that Content and Theme of the web pages are separated. Therefore, editing data would, in no way, affect the aspect of the site and vice versa.
Also, Drupal has an Application Programming Interface (API) which provide advanced users more flexibility. Consequently, users can create their own customised and personalised modules by writing in programming languages such as Php, Html or Javascript. As Drupal is Open Source and free, these modules can be redistributed to other Drupal users as well! Being open source means anyone can help the software community to change and improve the software itself with one's own code. Therefore, there is a great community of developers and users behind, ready to help and to fix issues. Developers often communicate on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which is basically a web chat.
Lastly, Drupal was created by Dried Buytaert in his dorm room in 2000. The name 'Drupal' originated from 'dorp' which meant village in Dutch, but made a typo when checking the domain name and decided the alternative one sounded better.(Drupal, from the Dutch 'druppel' which meant droplet, causing the creation of Druplicon, its logo). On its first version, it was initially only a chatting framework for his friends and him to communicate. The software was then made Open Source in 2001 after his graduation and has now more than 100,000 users actively contributing. Now its 8th version running called Drupal 8! It can be said that Drupal is the Swiss Army Knife of website development!
Image source: www.blog.onlinemediadirect.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/drupal_logo.png
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