The Drupal CMS Web Application Framework

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Drupal is a vast library of software built by an active community of developers with the primary focus of providing a secure, efficient, extensible framework for building highly functional dynamic user-focused websites. In addition to providing comprehensive "Content Management System" functionality out-of-the-box, Drupal offers hundreds of ready-to-use software building blocks that provide an unparalleled range of additional capabilities - all contributed by members of the Drupal developer community.

Egressive builds web sites with the building blocks Drupal provides, and where necessary builds new customised capabilities, many of which we return to the community so that others may benefit as we - and our customers - have. Because Drupal is freely available, our customers only pay Egressive for the time it takes us to install, configure, and customise Drupal to their requirements. Customers don't pay us for the privilege of using Drupal like they might for the proprietary CMSs offered by other web development firms. Our customers only pay for what they get, and moreover, the framework we make for them is theirs to do with as they like: in addition to their content, the code that makes their website run is theirs too! That's right - technological lock-in is a thing of the past. We want to work with customers who want to work with us, not with those who feel they have no other choice but to work with us.

Drupal features

  • Leading player - with more than 150,000 implementations around the world, the Drupal CMS is proven, scalable, secure, and reliable. After extensive evaluation of many competing platforms, Drupal was selected by IBM as their primary web application development platform.
  • User friendly – a usability experts Web Networks evaluated the Drupal user interface and found it to be consistent and user-focused, adhering well to best-practice guidelines.
  • Friendly URLs - Drupal provides customizable URLs that are both user and search engine friendly, e.g. http://yoursite.co.nz/contacts or http://yoursite.co.nz/events/your-big-event.
  • Modules - The Drupal community has contributed hundreds of functional modules which provide functionality like taxonomy display, jabber authentication, private messages, bookmarks, etc.
  • Online help - unlike many Open Source projects, provides excellent resources for Drupal users and developers alike. For developers, http://api.drupal.org is invaluable. The Drupal system itself and most 3rd party modules provide help text aggregated into every Drupal site's inbuilt help system.
  • Dynamic Interface - Drupal's user interface makes extensive use of "AJAX" web capabilities (part of what is sometimes referred to as "Web 2.0") which add a whole new dimension of responsiveness to web applications, allowing them act more like user-friendly desktop applications than what most people have come to expect from web sites.
  • Collaborative Books - Drupal's unique collaborative book feature lets you set up a project or "book" that needs to be written and then authorize other individuals to contribute content.
  • Open source - The source code of Drupal is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Unlike proprietary blogging or content management systems, Drupal's feature set is fully available to extend or customize as needed.
  • Searching - All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times.

User management

  • User Registration – Depending on site configuration, user registration can either be carried out completely online by site visitors (with new accounts moderated by a site administrator if desired) or only by invitation from a site administrator.
  • User Authentication - Users can log into the site using local authentication (via a database back-end) 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.
  • Personalization – Drupal provides a robust personalization environment for logged in users. 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 role groups.

Content management

  • Easy “codeless” content entry – all site content can be altered via web-browser based forms featuring a word processor-esque input capability and featuring “AJAX” usability advances. For advanced users, entry of raw XHTML and other data is supported.
  • Polls, Surveys, and Questionnaires - Drupal comes with a host of interactive modules for getting input from your site's users, enabling admins and/or users to create polls, surveys, and even multi-page questionnaires and show them on various pages.
  • Threaded comments - Drupal provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content be it stories, news articles, forum entries, etc. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum and can be enabled, disabled, and moderated as desired by administrators.
  • 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 and more. Version control features provide an option to keep a comment log and enables you to roll-back content to an earlier version.

Blogging

  • Personal Blogs – users can create and maintain their own personal blogs if allowed to do so by site administrators.
  • 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" such as NetNewsWire or Radio UserLand browse your Drupal site from the comfort of their desktop.
  • 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.

Platform

  • 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.
  • Written in PHP - Drupal is written in the ubiquitous PHP scripting language, the most widely used (and best known) web scripting language on the net by a wide margin. It is fast, versatile, secure and platform independent.
  • 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.

Administration and analysis

  • Analysis, Tracking and Statistics - Drupal can print browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate your site.
  • Accountability: 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.

Community features

  • Discussion forums - Full discussion forum features are built into Drupal to create lively, dynamic community sites.
  • Integrated mailing lists – Mailing lists integrated with forum and user groups allow users to receive emails from the site, and in some cases to contribute content and forum postings via email.
  • Email Alerts – Many aspects of Drupal will notify users via email (configurable on a per user basis) when they change or are updated.
  • Wiki Functionality - Drupal offers a full suite of Wiki capabilities (the best known example of a Wiki is Wikipedia), taking collaborative content generation to a new level.

Performance and scalability

  • 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.