BasicDog

What is Drupal?
Drupal is the system behind my website and thousands of others accross the internet, it is an open-source Content Management System (CMS), which is very easy to use for both website savvy individuals and beginners alike. A CMS can be used to set up all manner of different sites and most are easily customizable to your own preferences for both functionality and appearance.

For those who are not aware of what a CMS is, the Dictionary.com encyclopaedia describes it as:

“A content management system (CMS) is a program used to create a framework for the content of a Web site"

This loosely translates to me and you as software that you can use to make a professional looking website, without needing to know much (if any) web programming languages.

Setting up Drupal is as simple as buying a web domain name, and hosting and a database, then uploading files to the hosting and away you go. Drupal is no different and the few extra steps that you will have to do are described in an easy to understand manner.

What can you use Drupal for?

Drupal has the functionality to install “add-on modules” which can easily give you the functionality to make it adding content easier and can also enable your site for any of the following:

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Personal web sites or Blogs
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites
• Collaborative authoring environments
• Forums
• Peer-to-peer networking
• Newsletters
• Pod casting
• Picture galleries
• File uploads and downloads

Using modules is as simple as uploading a folder to your hosting and clicking a tick box on the drupal administer menus, and this incredibly simple interface is continued throughout the whole Drupal system.

More information on specific Drupal modules including my favourite ones will follow this review.

Customizing Drupal
Installing a theme is also as simple as using modules with Drupal, and there are many to chose from on the internet. When you have decided on the theme for you, some of them have the "colorpicker" feature which allows you to change the theme colour to what ever you prefer. I personally love this feature, it is truly inspired and works like a dream!

With the use of something called "blocks", customizing the appearence of Drupal is incredibly easy. Depending upon the theme that you have installed you will have sections such as header, footer and left/right side columns on the site, to which you can put the "blocks" in. For example, if you want a menu on the left hand side simply create a menu block and tell it to display in which ever section you want it.

Final Thoughts
Well my experience of Drupal has been a very pleasant one and a welcome break from the stress and time consumption of coding my old website to take every new article I wrote, so for saving time, effort and achieving a professional looking website it certainly delivers. Drupal continues to grow on me with the more features I discover for it, and if the Drupal site is anything to go by we have many more intuitive features heading our way. For a totally free piece of software it doesn't get much better than this.