What is Drupal | Drupal History |

Explain what is Drupal?

Drupal is free, open-source content management framework written in PHP. Drupal is distributed under GNU General Public License.

Drupal is a framework which organize, manage and publish content easily and provides a lot of features of customization.

As of December 2019, the Drupal community comprised more than 1.39 million    members,  including 117,000 users actively contributing, resulting in more than 44,000 free modules that extend and customize Drupal functionality, over 2,800 free themes that change the look and feel of Drupal, and at least 1,300 free distributions that allow users to quickly and easily set up a complex, use-specific Drupal in fewer steps.

The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to content-management systems. These include user account registration and maintenance, menu management, RSS feeds, taxonomy, page layout customization, and system administration. The Drupal core installation can serve as a simple website, a single- or multi-user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for user-generated content.

Drupal originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board, Drupal became an open source project in 2001. he name Drupal represents an English rendering of the Dutch word druppel, which means "drop" (as in a water droplet).  The name came from the now-defunct Drop.org website, whose code slowly evolved into Drupal. Buytaert wanted to call the site "dorp" (Dutch for "village") for its community aspects, but mistyped it when checking the domain name and thought the error sounded better.

As of 2014 Drupal is developed by a community. From July 2007 to June 2008 the Drupal.org site provided more than 1.4 million downloads of Drupal software, an increase of approximately 125% from the previous year.

As of January 2017 more than 1,180,000 sites use Drupal. These include hundreds of well-known organizations, including corporations, media and publishing companies, governments, non-profits, schools, and individuals. Drupal has won several Packt Open Source CMS Awards and won the Webware 100[clarification needed] three times in a row.

Drupal 6 was released on February 13, 2008, on March 5, 2009 Buytaert announced a code freeze for Drupal 7 for September 1, 2009. Drupal 7 was released on January 5, 2011, with release parties in several countries. After that, maintenance on Drupal 5 stopped, with only Drupal 7 and Drupal 6 maintained. Drupal 7 series maintenance updates are released regularly. Previously, Drupal 7's end-of-life was scheduled for November 2021, but given the impact of COVID-19, the end of life has been pushed back until November 28, 2022. Drupal 8 will still be end-of-life on November 2, 2021.

On October 7, 2015 Drupal 8 first release candidate (rc1) was announced. Drupal 8 includes new features and improvements for both users and developers, including: a revamped user interface; WYSIWYG and in-place editing; improved mobile support; added and improved key contributed modules including Views, Date, and Entity Reference; introduced a new object-oriented backend leveraging Symfony components; revamped configuration management; and improved multilingual support. Drupal 8 rc1 is the collective work of over 3,200 core contributors.

Drupal 8.0.0 was released on November 19, 2015. Subsequent major and minor releases which bring numerous improvements and bug fixes (including CKEditor WYSIWYG enhancements, added APIs, an improved help page) can be found on the Releases page.

Drupal 9 initial release 9.0.0 was on June 3, 2020.

Drupal 10's initial release schedule is on July 2022.

Core

In the Drupal community, "core" refers to the collaboratively built codebase that can be extended through contributory modules and – for versions prior to Drupal 8 – is kept outside of the "sites" folder of a Drupal installation. (Starting with version 8, core is kept in its own 'core' sub-directory.) Drupal core is the stock element of Drupal. Common Drupal-specific libraries, as well as the bootstrap process, are defined as Drupal core; all other functionality is defined as Drupal modules including the system module itself.

In a Drupal website's default configuration, authors can contribute content as either registered or anonymous users (at the discretion of the administrator). This content is accessible to web visitors through a variety of selectable criteria. As of Drupal 8, Drupal has adopted some Symfony libraries into Drupal core.

Core modules also includes a hierarchical taxonomy system, which lets developers categorize content or tagged with key words for easier access.

Drupal maintains a detailed changelog of core feature updates by version.