Drupal is a 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. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including

» Community web portals, Discussion sites, Corporate web sites, Intranet applications, Personal web sites or blogs, Aficionado sites, E-commerce applications, Resource directories, Social Networking sites

The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of available add-on modules, will enable features such as: » Content Management Systems, Blogs, Collaborative authoring environments, Forums, Peer-to-peer networking, Newsletters, Podcasting, Galleries, File uploads and downloads, and much more.

The great thing about Drupal is that you do not need to defend it. The sites made out of Drupal speak for themselves.

From publicly traded corporations such as Nike, Fed-Ex, Yahoo! and AOL to Britney Spears and R.E.M., Drupal is in ever growing demand.

Paul Albert created a presentation to convert Cornell's Medical University Library site to Drupal.

The Case for Drupal-- Why the Open Source CMS is Well-Suited for a Medical Academic Library from Paul Albert on Vimeo.

Dries Buytaert is passionate about the web, open source and photography. He is the original creator and project lead of Drupal, an open source social publishing system. He is co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a venture-backed software company that offers products and services for Drupal. Dries is also working on Mollom, a service that helps you identify content quality and that stops website spam. People often laugh with his hair but he is cool with that.

http://buytaert.net

Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a bulletin board system, Drupal became an open source project in 2001. Drupal is an English transliteration of the Dutch word “druppel,” which means “drop” (as in “a water droplet”). The name was taken from the now-defunct Drop.org website, whose code slowly evolved into Drupal. Buytaert wanted to call the site “dorp” (Dutch for “village,” referring to its community aspects), but made a typo when checking the domain name and thought it sounded better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal

I was recently asked my opinion of whether to use Drupal or one of those other ones. I was going to just write a flippant reply, when I realized I'm not actually qualified to answer the question.

I have never personally used WordPress. I read a comparison of it and Drupal some years ago, and knew even then that WordPress would just never cut it. And I've never looked back.

Now if Joomla had been part of the original question, I would have had slightly more qualifications to answer. I used that once (back when it was Mambo, and for all of three weeks), and was sorely impressed at first. But the glow faded quickly when I realized that though it was slick out of the box, it required more work tearing it down to make it do what I wanted than Drupal's simple building blocks offer. And again, I've never looked back.

WordPress

I dug up a few comparisons from Google, and they seem reasonable. 10 Reasons to Use Drupal has an obvious Drupal bias. WordPress Vs Drupal Vs Expression Engine has a WordPress bias. And WordPress vs Drupal can't make up its mind (its author continues to use both).

Joomla

I found a few comparisons of Joomla and Drupal, but they're largely out-dated, the first on the list dating from Drupal 4.7. Most of the negative points on Drupal on their list have turned into strong positives since then. That was a thorough comparison, but needs to be revised to warrant its current Google ranking.

Drupal

From a blog, to a news mogul, to a store-front, to a social network, to a university's portal site, Drupal can handle any of it. Just take a look at this slideshow:

With a strong community of developers, there are easy-to-use tools that can handle pretty much anything you can think of. Its underlying architecture is scalable, its API is robust, and Google loves Drupal; its SEO friendliness is well-known.

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