Drupal

Drupal is a highly configurable, modular content management system. Before you can answer if Drupal is right for you, consider a couple of questions: Which type of Drupal user are you, and what are your needs?

Below is a list of common user types followed by Drupal features. If the features meet your needs and you have the skill-set required to implement them, Drupal might be a perfect system for you.

I'm a Blogger and I need

• single- and/or multi-user blogs
• to categorize content
• commenting
• trackbacks
• custom style and layout using sample or custom themes
• image and/or other media support (podcasting, videoblogs, etc.)

I'm evaluating Drupal for my organization/company and we need

• customizable user roles and permissions
• robust security model
• scalability
• to configure and extend functionality to meet specific business need
• a support infrastructure (documentation, community, etc.)
• to categorize content
• additional features/functionality

I'm a community organizer and I need

• community members to easily share ideas (blogs, forum, files, etc.)
• members to have tools to help them self-organize
• a site that can evolve as the community evolves (keeping up with the state-of-the-art of interactive web sites)
• a support infrastructure (documentation, community, etc.)
• customizable user roles and permissions
• a site that is safe on the web (security, spam, trolls, etc.)
• a special distribution of Drupal and contributed modules that come preconfigured with community relationship management tools like CivicSpace.

I'm a small business owner and I need

• to set up the site myself
• custom style and layout using sample/custom themes
• customizable user roles and permissions
• a system that is scalable and adaptable to the needs of my changing business
• to categorize content
• a support infrastructure (documentation, community, etc.)
• e-commerce support (shopping carts, premium paid content subscriptions)
• to configure and extend functionality to meet specific business needs

I build or design websites for clients and I need

• to create a custom look and feel with my own themes
• additional features/functionality
• to easily provide support to my clients
• access to a community of designers and developers

I'm a programmer and I need

• a robust, well-designed, modular system that I can customize and extend
• well documented APIs
• system and architecture documentation and coding standards
• access to a community of other developers
• a rich feature list

You can install Drupal with a few clicks using Fantastico. However, Fantastico is often a release or two behind. Sometimes, these releases are feature enhancements, and sometimes, they are security patches. If you ask us to manually install Drupal for you (there's no extra charge), we automatically install the latest version of the software.

Drupal requires one MySQL database. It runs nicely on either of our plans, and can be installed either in the root directory of your website, or in a subdirectory.

It takes a little effort to learn to use any CMS, just as it takes an effort to learn to build a website any other way. However, once you have learned the basic skills, you can be highly productive with Drupal. We built the Paul Ding in 2008 website in about 3 hours. (We've since added some blog posts.) Extensions to Drupal are installable modules, meaning that you can install and learn to use the modules as you need them, keeping complexity to a minimum!

We have a particular fondness for Drupal, and we use it for this site. Feel free to call us, 24x7, when you can't figure out how to do something with your Drupal site.