Drupal is an open-source Content Management System, CMS.

Open Source?

Open source refers to the fact that the actual source code that has been written to create Drupal is openly shared with the Drupal development community. Drupal's core modules, as well as contributed add-on modules that make up what we refer to as the building blocks for a feature rich web-solution, are open to the general community of developers. The reason this is important is that it allows the maximum possible extensibility allowing any module to be customized to meet the exact needs of any particular project. This allows a developer to deliver highly sophisticated web-solutions at a relatively low cost.

Content Management System, CMS

A CMS is basically just what it sounds like, a system that allows a non-technical person to easily manage content from within the site itself.

Who Uses Drupal

There are some pretty impressive organizations using Drupal including many top-level U.S. government agencies and Fortune 100 companies. Here are a few sites that were developed using the Drupal framework:

www.WhiteHouse.gov - U.S. Government
www.Recovery.gov - U.S. Government
www.Commerce.gov - U.S. Government
www.London.gov.uk - English Government
www.BBC.co.uk - The British Broadcasting Corporation
www.KofiAnnanFoundation.org - Koffi Annan Foundation
www.sa2010.gov.za - South African Government
www.CityofAthens.gr - City of Athens, Greece
www.Forrester.com - Forrester Research
www.KentuckyDerby.com - Kentucky Derby
www.Mensa.org - The Smart People

Also, Drupal is the platform of choice for Sony BMI and all of their artists - here are a few:

www.BobDylan.com
www.MichaelJackson.com
www.ak.ChristinaAguilera.com

Then there are other major U.S. entertainment sites such as:

www.Grammy.com
www.Emmys.tv

The list is just too extensive to show here. No other open-source solution can boast the quality of organizations that have chosen Drupal as their CMS of choice; not Joomla - not WordPress - none.

What Makes Drupal so Special?

Drupal uses the same underpinnings as most Linux-based websites; HTML, PHP, Javascript, Cascading Style Sheets, and MySQL as the standard database. What makes Drupal stand above the rest is the way it is architected is the primary differentiator. The fact that there are two distinct layers - the data layer (or back end) and the presentation layer (or the user interface). This architecture makes Drupal extremely pliable and easy to give a site a fresh look without having to start from ground zero. In my opinion the next few things that really separate Drupal from other solutions are a few modules that make Drupal extremely robust.

Views is a module that essentially is a custom query writer that allows a relatively novice user to write fairly complex data queries and to layout the way the result set will be presented to the user. This is a feature that no other CMS can even come close to matching.

The permissions module works with Drupal's user roles module to allow field-level access, by module, to user-defined roles. And these are virtually unlimited. This allows you to give anonymous users one perspective of the site, registered users a different perspective, and various content managers even deeper access. The power of this model too is simply unmatched in any other open-source CMS solution.

Drupal = The Choice is Clear!

When considering all factors the decision to build your next project in Drupal is simply a no-brainer.