What is Drupal?

Never heard of a Content Management System before? Wondering how developers actually build all those websites you use? Read on and we’ll reveal some of the secrets of the web industry!

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Drupal is a Content Management System

Drupal (pronounced “droo-puhl”) is a Content Management Systems (CMS), which is a software products that allow us (as developers) to build you (as the client) a website that provides you with an administrative interface for creating and managing the content on your own.

There are many thousands of CMSes in the marketplace, however Drupal is one of the “big three” in use today, alongside Wordpress and Joomla.

Why should we use a Content Management System?

Quite simply, because it’s much faster for us to build your website using a CMS as a starting point, rather than having to go back to the beginning and start from scratch.

Using a CMS means you start with a huge amount of functionality before you even begin, and Drupal is easily expanded through the use of addon modules, to enable even more functionality without having to write a single line of code. While a CMS does force developers to work within the boundaries of how the CMS is designed to operate, this limitation is utterly trivial in comparison to the amount of time and effort saved.

History of Drupal

Drupal began its life as a message board between friends, created by University of Antwerp student Dries Buytaert. After proving itself useful, version 1.0 was released to the public in January 2001.

CMSes were relatively primitive back in the early 2000s, however Drupal’s modularity proved popular, and it attracted an ever-increasing userbase, and versions 1 through 4 saw the addition of some of the core concepts we still use today. Version 4 was where Drupal’s development really took off, and versions 4.1 through 4.7 saw a massive explosion in growth, not only of people using the package but also contributing addon modules back to the ecosystem.

Each of the following versions 5, 6, 7 and now 8 were enormous advancements over the previous version, with Drupal’s ethos of not allowing backwards compatibility to hold them back meaning each new version of the platform contained significant internal rewrites, which allowed Drupal to keep up with the times.

We are currently on version 8.5, and with every release Drupal just keeps on improving. Having been personally developing with Drupal since version 5, seeing the way the platform has grown has been a fantastic ride, and Drupal today is a modern, dynamic, leading-edge web content development framework, and we here at Assembler are proud to be a part of the overall Drupal community.