SevenOutsource

Drupal is one of the most powerful Open Source solutions for Content Management Systems. Because it is robust, easy to use, and constantly growing and adapting to the needs of the large, worldwide community of Drupal users. The Drupal Association is a not-for-profit association, registered in Belgium. Its purpose is to provide support to the Drupal project and promote Drupal. To develop a leading edge open-source content management system that implements the latest thinking and best practices in community publishing, knowledge management, and software design.

Drupal aims to provide a slim, powerful core that can be readily extended through custom modules. One great benefit of Drupal is that it’s being actively developed by a large and growing development community. To ensure excellent performance, Drupal puts a premium on low-profile coding (for example, minimizing database queries). The Drupal Association leaves the planning or development of the Drupal open source project in the very capable hands of the global Drupal community itself. The software continues to evolve and improve as one of the leading-edge website systems.

The Drupal Association focuses on other important things like:

* Acquiring and managing the Drupal.org server infrastructure.
* Write and publishing press releases and promotional materials.
* Organizing and/or sponsor Drupal events, and represent the Drupal project at events.
* Raising money to promote Drupal
* Supporting Drupal development by awarding grants or paying wages.
* Engaging in partnerships with other organizations.

Drupal is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website. High quality, elegant, documented code is a priority over roughed-in functionality. Hundreds of thousands of people and organizations have Drupal-powered websites, including newspapers and magazines, community web portals and discussion sites, corporate web sites/intranet portals, personal web sites, video and podcasting sites,  aficionado sites, e-commerce applications and resource directories. Drupal supports established and emerging standards. Specific target standards include XHTML and CSS.

Drupal should also have minimal, widely-available server-side software requirements. Drupal code is free, as are updates. Modules (special features) are being constantly contributed by the community. Specifically, Drupal is itself open source and builds on and supports other open source projects. Drupal should be fully operational on a platform with a web server, PHP, and either MySQL or Postgresql. The developers at pingVision have found Drupal to be a relatively easy, flexible, and inexpensive solution for their clients. Drupal is based on the open source philosophy of collaborative free software development and is licensed under the GPL. Drupal is ready to go from the moment you download it.

Drupal-powered websites offer: ease of updating website content, strong search engine optimization, flexible theming and presentation, powerful “Web 2.0-type” interactive tools, and modularity that makes adding new features relatively easy. Specifically, Drupal is coded in the open source scripting language PHP and supports as primary data sources the open source database formats MySQL and Postgresql.