Drupal is an open-source Content Management System (CMS) which is particularly
suited to customization through use of blocks, themes and modules. Drupal's
innovative use of taxonomy and its unique menu system allow for effective
management of content as a site grows or evolves.
With Drupal we can easily setup a blog, but we can also set up many more things,
just from looking at Drupal sites we can designed: community with blogs and
forums, calendar, ecommerce, magazine, corporate site, image gallery, intranet
app to manage docs. Driving the ongoing development of Drupal is the desire for
a simple and powerful framework which developers can work within to create
custom web applications without having to build the pieces that nearly all
websites have as a foundation (user authentication, content creation interface,
layout management).
Unlike other similar CMS's, Drupal takes its role as a framework very seriously.
Take a look at the database structure of any other CMS that has been around
for a while, and you'll almost certainly find a labyrinth of tables with mysterious
names and seemingly redundant purposes. Drupal's database design is clean
and constantly being re-factored. Tables that have outlived their purpose are
removed from the schema and the code. Table design is very generic, allowing
different types of content and modules to share the same table space.
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