What is this Drupal and why is it so great?

Drupal is a very powerful open source content management system. With it you can build feature rich websites that are easy for content owners to maintain, and that scale well to the enterprise level. Simply put, if you have a highly interactive web project that needs to serve a lot of users, Drupal is the best platform choice.

Why is Drupal better than other content management systems (CMS)? There are lots of reasons:

Custom Content Creation

Using the Content Creation Kit (CCK) and Views modules, you can create custom content types and display this content in views without writing any code at all. You can create custom content types for blog posts, press releases, products, job listings or whatever is required by your project.

URL Control

Individual items in Drupal are called nodes, and each of these nodes can have it's own human-readable URL. This is huge for your SEO efforts because everything in your Drupal site is easy for Google to index. Easy to index means higher page rank and higher visibility in Google search results.

Taxonomy

Drupal taxonomy is a very powerful way of organizing the content of your site. It uses vocabulary terms to tag and categorize your content both for easy display and styling, and to make that content easier to find on your site.

User Management

A large community site will have many different people working on lots of different things. The Drupal user management system gives you the power to create users, roles and permissions to strictly define what individuals can and cannot do on your site. For example, "authenticated users" may be able to comment on blog posts, "moderators" may be able to edit those comments and remove offensive words, and "editors" may be able to approve "authors'" blog posts for publication. "Administrators" are tasked with the job of maintaining the overall structure and wellness of the site. All of this comes "out of the box" with Drupal.

Drupal Community

Drupal has an outstanding world-wide community of developers, themers and business people committed to using, improving and maintaining the Drupal code base. This includes excellent documentation of community code, as well as code help, tutorials, blogs, videos and podcasts dedicated to supporting the Drupal community.

Market Penetration

You have probably been on a Drupal website before and not even known it. There are many Drupal websites out there, but here are some examples of high-profile websites built on the Drupal framework: