What is Drupal?

As I mentioned on My Page, Drupal is a ridiculously powerful tool for building websites. In this blog post I'm going to try and demonstrate that.

Drupal is everywhere. Chances are, that if you use the web a lot, you use Drupal everyday and don't even know it.

Drupal is simply the most thought out, well programmed application ever written in PHP and MySQL. Any experienced programmer can recognize that just by looking at the code.

Drupal is also no longer just an obscure open source project programmed by a bunch of nerd shut-ins. Drupal now has commercial backing, thanks to www.acquia.com . They are to Drupal what RedHat is to Linux.

If you are considering looking into a content management system for a project of yours, please do yourself a favor and use Drupal. There are other systems that look nice and shiny, but don't be deceived!

At the bottom of this post are links to lists of the largest and most popular drupal sites. But first, here's some insights into what I've been building with Drupal recently.

LocalArt.Biz
A great example is a site I recently created that has been stewing in my head for years, localart.biz . I've attempted to build what was in my head with drupal a few times over the years, but the software just wasn't ready to allow me to do what I wanted without doing some intense custom coding.

I built LocalArt.biz using ONLY contributed modules, in about 4 days. Everything in the site was built using the web-based configuration system which is what makes Drupal so powerful. Once you install the right modules, everything can be built without writing code. Even the fading slideshow is generated by a module, all I had to do was position it where I wanted it with CSS.

Content Types were created with fields for images and sales information. Pages were built with two killer-app modules called Panels and Views, a panel being a total replacement for manual CSS layouts. User's have profiles, and the pages for each city filter the users AND artwork based on what they enter in their profile.

There is a lot of complexity in this site, I could have a whole 'nother blog post about it. The point is, Drupal has matured incredibly. Remember, it only took about 4 days to put localart.biz together

NookAndCrannyRecords.com
Drupal's Content Creation Kit makes adding fields to a type of content a piece of cake. (p.s. All content is a node. A node's type determines what fields and functionality that node features) Node-Reference fields allow you to reference content together in any way you can imagine.

NookAndCrannyRecords.com is a perfect example of this. There are many content types: Artists, Albums, Tracks, Videos, Photos, Blogs, and soon Events. They relate together like this:
- Albums has a node-reference field for Artists that allows for multiple selection, for Compilations. A "View" on the Artist's page then lists the Albums that are associated with that artist.
- Tracks are actually different, the audio.module handles it, and extracts the artist/album info from the ID3 tags of the MP3. Custom code is there to search for the artist or album name to create a filtered list of tracks.
- Videos, Photos, Blogs, and Events can all be assoiated with artists as well.

The result: http://nookandcrannyrecords.com/squeaky

This page is generated by Panels, which allows me to drag and drop the boxes at will, change the layout, and add new stuff whenever I want to. Its fantastic.

--

That's the problem with Drupal... there is so much you can do you can kinda go on forever.

Here are some great links to find out more:

Building a Basecamp in 48 hrs
http://www.doitwithdrupal.com/sessions/basecamp-built-drupal - Download a PDF or the site itself
http://www.doitwithdrupal.com/free-videos - Video
This is a fantastic demonstration of what Drupal can do, and it's a presentation geared towards total Drupal newbs :)

Watch how they built www.rockclimbr.com, a basecamp clone, in 48 hrs.

Dries Buytaert (Creator of Drupal) List of Drupal Sites
http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites?page=16 - This is a continually updated list of major Drupal sites. You'll have to go many pages deep to see some of the best, I actually recommend starting at the last page and moving
forward.

List of Media Websites Using Drupal
http://groups.drupal.org/node/5100
The biggest include theonion.com, popsci.com, motherjones.com, fastcompany.com, mtv.co.uk, jacksonville.com, miami.com, and about 130 others, including newspapers, TV, magazines, and radio.
This list isn't even that complete :)