About the Drupal Community

If you are just learning about drupal, here is a bit of background. 

Drupal is an open source Web Content Management System (CMS) first released in 2001. It was founded by Dries Buytaert, and means “drop” in Dutch. Drupal is both a development platform and a well-established open-source community with over 350,000 subscribed members, and millions of copies of the Drupal application downloaded.  This broad community means that instead of a handful of developers that might be managing a private-label or custom CMS, there are literally tens of thousands of dedicated developers who understand how Drupal works, and provide a deep developer pool. It also means the software is in widespread use, so well tested in the real world.

Drupal was designed for multiple users and is implemented frequently in corporate/community driven environments. Web pages are dynamically-built from a database. This means the pages you see are built each time your site visitors view them (often they are cached to speed this process up). They are displayed through templates or the “theme” as we call it.  If your experience with web sites is with Dreamweaver or other static-page websites where you’ll have dozens of files in directories – there are no real HTML files or folders in the site. This allows for a site with 20 or 20 million pages.

You update content in a CMS through your web browser - so using Internet Explorer, Safari or Firefox.  All content updates are written and stored in the database, and are rendered when needed. With thousands of add-on modules like blogs, social media support, e-commerce and discussion forums Drupal is a framework for building most any type of web site. We are passionate about Drupal because of this unique ability to create beautiful, powerful web sites that are user-friendly and easy for non-developers to manage.

Additional Links

History, Mission & The Community Supporting Drupal:
http://drupal.org/History-mission-and-community

Seattle's Drupal Users Group:
http://groups.drupal.org/seattle

A showcase of other sites in Drupal:
http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites

Drupal Main Community Web Site:
http://drupal.org

Case Studies:
http://drupal.org/cases

Learning Drupal Resources:
http://drupal.org/books