Drupal is a Content Management System which integerates a bunch of interesting features. I consider it to be a very useful tool for websites which cater to a lot of changing content and cater to a large and active userbase. The new version has some major improvements including changes to the original database. The list of features include
Collaborative Book
Friendly URL’s
Modules
Online help
Open source
Personalization
Role based permission
Searching
Recently Modified List
User management
User authentication
Polls
Templating
Threaded comments
Version control
Blogger API support
Content syndication
News aggregator
Permalinks
Platforms supported: Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X
Database independence
Multi-language
Analysis, Tracking and Statistics
Logging and Reporting
Web based administration
Discussion forums
Caching
If this long list of features makes any sense to you, go to Drupal.org and download 4.3.0 Release Candidate of Drupal. Even though this is a release candidate, it is quite stable.
*Edit* I believe this comment from Gunnar Lanegnmark deserves to be a part of this post:
What you miss from the very long list is the taxonomy system. Most people do not realize how much you can do with the right taxonomy system. Categories are not served well by one simple hierarchical list. That is the most compelling feature in Drupal, and the one which originally made me dump PostNuke, MT etc.
Now – a year later – Drupal is rocking once again. The feature list is as long as the 100 modules. Drupal has the best approach for a professional Information Architect and for a programmer. I am not a programmer, and some things are hard to do in Drupal if you are not a programmer, but I know they will come, if I ask for them, and have the patience to wait.
In other systems things are too complicated for developers to change, because the fundamental philosophy of their coding standards is flawed – so you will never get what you want, simply because it is too hard to code.
What you miss from the very long list is the taxonomy system. Most people do not realize how much you can do with the right taxonomy system. Categories are not served well by one simple hierarchical list. That is the most compelling feature in Drupal, and the one which originally made me dump PostNuke, MT etc.
Now – a year later – Drupal is rocking once again. The feature list is as long as the 100 modules. Drupal has the best approach for a professional Information Architect and for a programmer. I am not a programmer, and some things are hard to do in Drupal if you are not a programmer, but I know they will come, if I ask for them, and have the patience to wait.
In other systems things are too complicated for developers to change, because the fundamental philosophy of their coding standards is flawed – so you will never get what you want, simply because it is too hard to code.