Drupal - The Open Source Content Mangement System

Drupal is a Open Source CMS (Content Management System).

It is one among the other 'contenders' like Joomla, Mamboo, PHPNuke, and many other CMS. Like other CMS it lets you create a website, to which you can easily add content and update it - it lets you manage it.

Drupal has its own share of hurdles along with its positives.

Let us look at some of the positives:

• Free - It is as free as any open source software can get. Since it is being developed by under the GPL terms, 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, in my opinion, the most flexible architecture one can get when compared to the other open source CMS available. Everything, in Drupal is a node (a content unit), except for comments and profiles. There are plans to shift that to node architecture - but making all other content types a node is flexible enough.
• 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.

As I said, Drupal has its own share of cons.

• Learning curve/specialized knowledge - With great power comes great responsibility. (I could not help it, with the release of Spider Man 3). As I mentioned in the earlier post, 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 - I have seen that 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. It may be just that we are all resistive to change, but sometimes, I too feel a bit wary.

Have any of you used Drupal? Or any other CMS, for that matter?