What Is CMS?:A CMS (Content Management System) is a computer system that allows publishing, editing and modifying content as well as site maintenance from a central page. In other way, CMS is typically a software tool used by both technical and non-technical staff to manage the creation of structured web pages for a web based experience such as an Internet Website, Intranet or Extranet solution.Web content includes text and embedded graphics, photos, video, audio, and code that renders other content or interacts with the user. A website which offers a content management system allows a website owner to add their own text, images, data, etc to the site without having to understand how to use html, xhtml, javascript, etc.These days Specialist WCMS vendors start including Web 2.0 based technologies like RSS feed, Social Networks, Tagging and others into their offering, further making the distinction between Web Content Management and Web-enabled Content Management difficult to make.Web Content Management systems were developed to resolve the issue of having highly experienced technical staff adding low level content to a website. But now a days, there are very few web content management tools on the market today that talk only about the process of creating and managing content.About Drupal:Drupal is free, flexible, robust and constantly being improved by hundreds of thousands of passionate people from all over the world. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to CMSs.Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) and Content Management Framework (CMF) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for leading websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites. It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.In other way, this powerfull CMS is a free community supported framework for creating, organizing, presenting and managing a website. It powers millions of websites and applications from all over the world. Drupal makes it easy for contributors to publish to websites and easy for developers to deploy new sites as well as add features to existing ones.These include user account registration and maintenance, menu management, RSS-feeds, page layout customization, and system administration. The Drupal core installation can be used as a brochure ware website, a single- or multi-user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for user-generated content.The best part of the Drupal CMS is that it is usable in 182 languages and the blogger residing in any of the 228 countries of world can use it to create a website.Valuable and unbeatable features of the Drupal CMS have made it popular among the webmasters and the bloggers. Most commonly referred to as a content management system or CMS, Drupal has much more to offer. This CMS is a great choice for building all manner of websites from simple. It is particularly well suited to e-Learning systems, Community/social networking sites, and news publishing, where its powerful authoring and publishing features allow administrators to create, revise, and deploy content in a rapid and organized manner. User management, site reporting and statistics, ad management, community management, and other administrative functions utilize an intuitive and robust back-end user interface.Drupal History:The name 'Drupal' is derived from the Dutch word 'drupel' which means "drop". The name was taken from the now-defunct Drop.org website, whose code slowly evolved into Drupal. But interest in Drupal got a significant boost in 2003, the Drupal website listed more than 100 vendors that offer Drupal-related services. A community now helps develop Drupal and Drupal's popularity is growing rapidly. From July 2007 to June 2008, Drupal was downloaded from the Drupal.org website more than 1.4 million times, an increase more than 100% from the previous year.As record of February 2012, thousands of sites used Drupal. There are some types of the websites noticed like- well-known organizations including corporations, media & publishing companies, governments, non-profits, schools and individuals too. This CMS also won Open Source CMS Awards.In additional its new version, Drupal 8 is in under development from 2011 but not ready to use. And a new feature of the Drupal 8, has various categories based implementation of the website as- Mobile, Core initiatives, Layouts, Web Services and Configuration management.Drupal Installation:Drupal Core is a a bunch of modules and themes intended to provide a foundation for deploying Drupal based websites. On Drupal installations side this includes a set of modules called core modules, which provide features such as user management, menu systems, and user contributed content. Drupal Core includes common features and is easily extended with added modules and themes.The Drupal open source community (one of the largest in the world) contributes and supports thousands of free flexible and robust modules and themes, which can be easily integrated into websites to offer powerful features such as multimedia, calendars, rating systems, and other social media tools.Drupal is also an application framework that can be used to build other aps. Drupal requires no programming skills yet the HTML code produced is accessible, cross browser compatible and search engine friendly. Drupal is used for every type of site from personal blogs to highly trafficked enterprise level sites. According to worldwide statistics around 2.5% of all websites are built in Drupal including whitehouse.gov, many other high profile and highly visited sites too.There is a good thing for the version updates notifications for the administrator of modules, themes, or the Drupal core. Such a feature can be useful for security fixes.Drupal Database:The Database API was built with object-oriented design concepts. This is designed to preserve the syntax and power of SQL as much as possible. The Drupal database layer is built a top PHP's PDO library. PDO provides a unified, object-oriented API for accessing different databases but it does not provide an abstraction for the different dialects of SQL used by different databases.If we say for the Drupal Technology then this is built on PHP and need very basic server. A web server that can run PHP (including Appache, IIS & ngix). MySQL is commonly used for a database.Drupal had functions which performed tasks related to databases, such as SQL query cleansing, multi-site table name prefixing, and generating proper SQL queries. In particular, Drupal 6 introduced an abstraction layer that allowed programmers to create SQL queries without writing SQL.Latest version of Drupal like D7 extends the data abstraction layer so that a programmer no longer needs to write SQL queries as text strings. It uses PHP Data Objects to abstract the physical database. Drupal uses its own defined functions and stataments patterns along with PHP scripts.A new database abstraction layer and ability with Drupal 7 to run on IIS, it is now mor ease for Windows developers to participate in the Drupal community. About Drupal caches it also maintains database schema metadata as well as elements such as blocks, forms and menus. Aslo Drupal 7 increases performance in database queries and reduces PHP code usage.Drupal Module:One of the great things about Drupal is the vast collection of ad-ons called 'Contrib Modules'. There are lots of the modules offered by Drupal to use like- views, panel, imagecache, profile, search api, node access, content listings, WYSIWYG editors, private messaging, third-party integration tools and more. As per 2012 stats the Drupal increased free module more than 12K. These modules are developed, contributed, and supported by the Drupal open source community. Currently, there are over 10,500 Contrib Modules available for free download. When selecting a module, you can see info about it such as number of downloads, open bugs, when it was last updated, and developer comments and answers.Drupal works on its node created contents, nodes are related to sets of content and functionality. All content on a Drupal site, be it a blog post, article, static page, forum topic etc is stored as and has common attributes of 'nodes'.Some famous modules could be seen as- Modules such as CCk, Views, QViews, Theme Key, Node_Import, Content taxonomy, Web Form, View_slideshow, Lightbox2, Pathauto, Kufon, Nodereference, Node_queue, TinyMCE, FCKEditor, CKEditor, Site Search, UberCart (For E- commerce), News, Calendar, FAQ, Nicemenu, Admin Menu, Admintheme, IMCE, Image, IMageAPI, SWFTools(Flash), GTranslate, Google Analytics, Sitemap, XML Sitemap, Poll, banner, Relatedlinks, Taxonomy, Taxonomy_Image, Backup_Migrate.Drupal Theme:Drupal themes use standardized formats that may be generated by common third-party theme design engines. Drupal Themes are what determines the look and feel of Drupal sites. You can select a theme contributed by the community and customize it to suit your needs. You can also create your own themes. Themes are often created to suit a specific purpose or tye of site. There are themes for News sites, corporate sites, Blogs, commerce sites and any more. Drupal Core includes a variety of Core Themes to suit many types of sites and styles. Some themes are designed to be highly customizable, there are also modules such as the Drupal Color Manager allow site admins to easily customize the look and feel of themes.There are more famous themes like- Garland, zero-point, Seven, Rubik & Tao etc. The Drupal theming system utilizes a template engine to further separate HTML/CSS from PHP. A popular Drupal contributed module called 'Devel' provides GUI information to developers and themers about the page build.Drupal Security:Drupal's security is a strong factor of the website and also administrators of
