What is Drupal?

Drupal is an open source content management platform, written in the programming language PHP. Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board, Drupal became an open source project in 2001.

Drupal was also designed to allow new features and custom behaviour to be added by third parties. For this reason, Drupal is sometimes described as a “Content Management Framework”. Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic web site installation and administration. You can power many different types of websites with it without knowing any coding languages.

Drupal web development at Software Associates

Our open source development group has deployed Drupal content management systems for our clients across United Kingdom (London) and USA (New York and Washington). We follow continous integration and agile scrum methodologies for project execution in order to ensure project predictability and on time delivery.

Drupal capabilities

• Theme customization: Customisation of themes according to user requirement.
• e-Commerce: We can provide HSBC payment (API) integration. As of now the methods supported by are Authorize.Net, CCard, COD, Eurobill, eWay, iTransact, PayPal, WorldPay.
• CCk module: For custom fields in the web form.
• Captcha: To block form submissions from spambots – automated scripts that harvest email address from publicly available web forms.
• Google maps: The GMap module provides an interface to the Google Maps API within Drupal. It integrates with the Location module to provide users a clickable map for entering latitude and longitude as well as to display maps of Drupal nodes and users.

General features

• Collaborative Book: The unique collaborative book feature lets you setup a “book” and then authorize other individuals to contribute content.
• Friendly URLs: Drupal uses Apache’s mod_rewrite to enable customizable URLs that are both user and search engine friendly.
• Modules: The Drupal community has contributed many modules which provide functionality that extend Drupal core.
• Online help: Like many Open Source projects Drupal provides online help system built into the core help text.
• Open source: The source code of Drupal is freely available under the terms of the GNU General
• Public License 2 (GPL): Unlike proprietary blogging or content management systems, Drupal’s feature set is fully available to extend or customize as needed.
• Personalization: A robust personalization environment is at the core of Drupal. Both the content and the presentation can be individualized based on user-defined preferences.
• Role based permission system: Drupal administrators don’t have to tediously setup permissions for each user. Instead, they assign permissions to roles and then group like users into a role group.
• Searching: All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times if you take advantage of the built in search module.

Content management using Drupal

• Polls: Drupal comes with a poll module which enables admins and/or users to create polls and show them on various pages.
• Templating: Drupal’s theme system separates content from presentation allowing you to control the look and feel of your Drupal site.
• Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP coding meaning that you don’t have to learn a proprietary templating language.
• Threaded comments: Drupal provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum

Platform

• Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X support: Drupal was designed from the start to be multi-platform. Not only can you use it with either Apache or Microsoft IIS but we also have Drupal running on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms.
• Database independence: Drupal is built on top of a database abstraction layer that enables to use Drupal with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Other SQL databases can be supported by writing a supporting database backend containing fourteen functions and creating a matching SQL database scheme.
• Multi-language: Drupal is designed to meet the requirements of an international audience and provides a full framework to create a multi-lingual website, blog, content management system or community application. All text can be translated using a graphical user interface, by importing existing translations, or by integrating with other translation tools such as the GNU gettext administration and analysis.
• Analysis, tracking and statistics: Drupal can print browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate your site.
• Logging and reporting: All important activities and system events are captured in an event log to be reviewed by an administrator at a later time.
• Web based administration: Drupal can be administered entirely using a web browser, making it possible to access it from around the world and requires no additional software to be installed on your computer.