Drupal is a powerful community and content management system and platform. It allows for a community of users to easily publish, manage, and interact around a wide variety of content on a website. It provides the plumbing for large-scale online community and social networking websites.

Tens of thousands of people and organizations have successfully employed Drupal, and it is increasingly the best choice for developing complex, scalable content and community-driven sites.

(See http://drupal.org/about.)

Drupal is open source software distributed under the General Public License (GPL) and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. Drupal is free to download and use, and there are no restrictions on modifying and extending it or utilizing it for commercial use.

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License.)

Technical details

Drupal is flexible and allows for complete customization. It has a sophisticated modular architecture as well as a theme layer that separates presentation from functionality. Drupal has a powerful application programming interface (API) that allows for the creation of new modules that interact with and extend the system.

Drupal supports both PHP 4 and 5 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP). It utilizes a MySQL database back-end by default (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL) but features a database abstraction layer that allows for any database engine to be supported. It employs standards-based XHTML and CSS and incorporates the jQuery JavaScript library (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jquery) for complete AJAX and DHTML support.

Drupal works best on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Linux is recommended, but Windows is also supported. Apache web server is recommended, but IIS is also supported.

(See http://drupal.org/requirements.)