One of the latest open-source CMS-platforms written in PHP, Drupal is a fast-growing platform worldwide. Its web-footprint is higher than 2.3% of all web sites online. It frames everything from blogs to corporate, political, and governmental web pages. Drupal’s first release was in May 2000, with the latest stable release, version 8.3.4, available in June 2017.

Drupal has matured into a reliable platform with a community of 1.3 million users. Programmers who contribute actively make up 10% of its devotees. So far, the Drupal community has created around 40,000 free modules that constantly bring new functionalities to Drupal. Around 2500 free themes have also been created to change Drupal’s look and feel. It boasts over a 1000 distributions that simplify and speed up the setup of complex, use-specific Drupal installations.

As of January 2017, Drupal is available in at least 100 languages. Though English is its default language, its ubiquity means support for right-to-left languages.

Technology
Drupal consists of the core framework with a variety of extensions to customize for your business needs. In each Drupal module installation, the core folder provides the stock elements of the environment. Stock elements include the bootstrap and common libraries. When including optional modules, which save programmers’ time when developing Drupal-based web sites, Drupal enhances technical functionalities like caching and feature throttling for improved performance and administrative functionalities.

• Access statistics and logging
• Various access control restrictions (user roles, IP addresses, email)
• Security and new release update notification
• Multi-site support
• OpenID support and UI/UX-focused functionalities, including
• Descriptive URLs
• Advanced search
• User profiles
• Blogs, books, comments, forums, and polls
• Multi-level menu system
• Multi-user content creation and editing
• Workflow tools (triggers and actions)
• RSS feed and feed aggregator

Since version 6, Drupal allows programmers to create SQL queries without writing SQL, and since v7, the database is abstracted to PHP Data Objects. Microsoft has also written a database driver for their SQL Server, which makes developing in Windows environments much easier. With the Drupal 7, SQLite is also supported.

Conclusion
Because of its growing base of followers and supporters, Drupal offers a great platform for new projects .Well-suited for even the most demanding enterprise-level endeavors, it can be elegantly extended with further functionality. Contact our Drupal experts, who will be happy to show you how Drupal will enhance your project.