CHAPTER 1 Drupal Overview This book will show you how to build many different types of websites using the Drupal web publishing platform. Whether you're promoting your rock band or building your company's intranet, some of your needs will be the same. From a foundational per- spective, your site will have content; be it audio or text or animated GIF images, a website communicates its content to the world. You will also need to manage this content. Although it's possible to roll your own system with enough knowledge of the underlying web technologies, Drupal makes creating your website, adding new fea- tures, and day-to-day editing of content quick and easy. And finally, your website will have visitors, and this book will show you many different ways in which you can engage and interact with your community using Drupal. This chapter will begin by providing the hard facts about Drupal: what it is, who uses it, and why they chose it. It will then dive into a conceptual overview, starting with what this ambiguous term "content management" actually means, and how we arrived at building websites this way. And finally, we'll define and explain the core Drupal concepts that are necessary to understand how Drupal handles its content. What Is Drupal? Drupal is an open source 1 content management system (CMS) being used by hundreds of thousands of organizations and individuals to build engaging, content-rich websites. Building a website in Drupal is a matter of combining together various "building blocks," which are described later in this chapter, in order to customize your website's functionality to your precise needs. Once built, a Drupal website can be maintained through the use of online forms, without any code having to be changed manually. Drupal is free to use, and it has an enormous library of constantly evolving tools that you can use to make your website shine. 1. For more on the open source software movement, please see http://opensource.org--which, incidentally, is also a Drupal site. 1