After visiting Funkaam, couple of my friends enquired about how it was designed; whether it was designed from scratch or some tool/ skeletal frame as used. After clarifying couple of their concerns I thought may be puting a write up regarding it, would make things easier. Funkaam is designed using Content Management System (CMS) named Drupal. This is one among many open source CMS softwares; Joomla, Mamboo, PHPNuke to name a few of them. There are quite a few commercial or proprietory CMS like Expression Engine available also.

To create a website, CMS provides a underframe, with ample scope for customization, to add and manage content. It can use a filesystem or DBMS to manage he content. Drupal manages the content using the DBMS,MySQL to be more specific. Like anyone of these above mentioned CMS softwares, Drupal has it's own inconveniences along with it's proficient features.

Positives of Drupal at a Glance:

• Free - It is as free as any open source software can get. Anyone can download the CMS free of cost, make changes to it to their hearts content and use it for their own purposes - non-profit or for-profit sites. You are not required to give any royalty or licensing fees.
• Flexible - It has, pretty flexible architecture. Everything, in Drupal is a node (a content unit), except for comments and profiles.
• Scalable - In terms of workflow and features, Drupal is quite scalable. It is limited by the hardware it sits on. This owes to the (node) modular architecture of Drupal.
• Community for core and contributed modules - Drupal has got a huge community who are continuously working on the Drupal core and also are creating contributed modules that extend what can be done using Drupal.

And now it's share of cons:

• Learning curve/specialized knowledge - Open source software does not necessarily mean cost free software. The Drupal architecture - being so different (almost in a zen way), makes it difficult for people from other CMS to migrate to. Hence, if you are not ready to learn Drupal (say, to heavily customize it), you will have to hire someone who knows.
• Availibility of themes - It might be due to the Drupal architecture - or it might be because Drupal attracts coders more than designers - it has less number of themes when compared to other CMS.
• Rapid Development - There seems to be rapid development happening in the Drupal community and it seems like, many are concerned it may lead to instability. Drupal 4.7 was a standard some time back and had been stable for quite a while. People had gotten comfortable with it and were used to it. Drupal 5 came along with lots of new features. Now, they are already working on Drupal 6.

This write up is an extract of Vyoma's blog post at Splat, who is the architect of Funkaam and thecredit of designing and managing the site goes to him.