Chapter 1
The Big Picture
In This Chapter
Understanding open source software
Comparing Content Management Systems
Developing a website with Drupal
Knowing Drupal’s potential
At the dawn of time, if you wanted to create a fully featured website with forms, a blog, and a message board, you practically had to be a computer programmer — or at least have enough dirt on a programmer to bribe him into building a website for you. You needed to know how to write HTML (and possibly JavaScript and CSS), and to accomplish anything dynamic, you needed to know yet another language such as PHP or ASP. You probably would have needed to know SQL, the language that allows websites to store and retrieve information.
As the waters receded and the years wore on, web developers grew weary of having to build each and every site from scratch and began freely sharing code. If you knew some HTML and a few other things, you could use the work of other people to knit your site together. No longer did you need to write code every time you wanted a contact form or poll or image library on your website.
Today, we have entire robust and powerful web applications, supported by communities of web developers. Enter Drupal. Drupal is one of a class of web applications that do nearly all the work for you. You can build a site with Drupal without ever writing a single line of code. Indeed, that’s the ultimate goal of Drupal: to free you from the inner workings of the code and instead let you focus on the layout and content of your site. There are other, similar applications you can use that also accomplish this, but Drupal is one of the best open source applications for quick, code-free website creation. In short, Drupal, just like RuPaul, makes looking good look easy.
Before we get into the installation and use of Drupal, we think it’s helpful to start by introducing the features of Drupal. After all, there’s no sense in installing it if you don’t know what it does, right? The more you understand about what Drupal is, the better you can plan and use it to your advantage.
What Drupal Is
The official Drupal website, http://drupal.org, describes Drupal as “a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.” This is a great description of this application. It’s free, as long as you follow certain rules that we mention later in this chapter. Drupal allows for a wide variety of content, making it extremely flexible and customizable. The fact that more than one individual can publish and manage content makes it a Content Management System (CMS). We explain each of these important characteristics of Drupal in more detail a little bit later on.
Free
Drupal is distributed as open source software. This means that you can get a copy of the program and install it on your web server, modify the appearance of the pages and layout to suit your needs, and add your content to it without paying for the program. It seems too good to be true!
Software designated as open source essentially...
