If you haven't heard of Drupal, you probably don't deal much with web development. Drupal is the rising star in the open source field with an ever-growing installed base as a very powerful content management system (CMS). Drupal is a website content management system that really allows you to rapidly create a prototype for your innovative web idea. How does it do that? A very active community with hundreds of modules for about every functionality you can imagine.

A couple years ago, my wife and I had an idea for a website community centered around women who play games - computer games, board games, card games, role-playing games, etc. We kind of had an idea for what we wanted the site to do, but we were not really certain of all the details. In the course of investigating the CMS options out there, I came across a product I had not encountered before in Drupal.

After installing Drupal, we would often have conversations like this:

"What do you think about having users vote on whether content appears on the home page?"
"Sounds great. Let me check the Drupal site for a module."
"Hey, there's a module for that, and I just spent five minutes downloading and installing it."
"Wow, I just took a bit of time to play with it a bit, and that does exactly what we want."

The same conversation happened for a user points system, for personal messaging, for blog support, and on and on. The bulk of the work ended up being in design with configuration tweaking somewhat less time. In other words, we were able to focus on the capabilities we wanted and quickly try out existing modules to see if they met our needs.

Out of the box, Drupal supports a lot of different things, and it really lets you build a website quickly and easily. If your website is primarily static content, you can spend your time working on the content. If your website is primarily functionality, you can spend your time searching the community for modules or writing your own. Being written in PHP with a MySQL or PostgreSQL database (though the latter might have some issues in some modules), it is a pretty standard open source development environment. Unlike a lot of commercial products out there, that means Drupal can get you up and running really quickly while providing limitless capabilities to customize the functionality your site provides. As a tool, Drupal both enables rapid prototype development for innovative ideas without forcing you to start over when you decide to take the next step.

Just in case you aren't sold yet on at least looking into Drupal for developing your new site, maybe you'll be sold by the fact that some very busy and popular sites use it for their content management system.

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