Why Drupal?

Drupal CMS is an Open Source, community based web content management application that allows government, corporate and individuals or communities of users to easily publish, manage and organise a wide variety of content on a website. The Drupal Open Source community numbers are in the tens of thousands and Drupal is considered to be the best Open Source CMS available today and for this reason is used worldwide powering scores of websites, including but not limited to:

• Government
• 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

One of Drupal’s key strengths is its ability to easily add new functionality and features to the core CMS by installing component based modules. These modules are extensively tested by the Drupal community with updates being made freely available. Modules number in the thousands and have the ability to expand the core Drupal CMS into a powerful and robust website allowing site owners to rapidly deploy new features as required.

The Drupal CMS powers several new high profile websites including the Prime Minister’s site designed by OPC. Drupal has withstood both authorised and unauthorised penetration attempts and is an excellent example of the system’s flexibility, scalability and accessibility. Open source projects are generally considered much more secure than their private, closed counter parts, precisely because the code is public. When an issue is found, it allows the almost immediate release of a fix by someone in the community.

In Australia, ABC’s three digital radio websites – Dig Music, ABC Jazz and ABC Country are powered by Drupal. Internationally, it is used by organisations as diverse as US President Barack Obama’s administration to Greenpeace to McDonalds. In particular the Obama administration sites www.recovery.gov and www.whitehouse.gov gave Drupal tremendous visibility in web development communities in the US and around the globe, resulting in new interest in Drupal in the public sector at the federal, state and local levels. Today, many government websites around the world utilise the Drupal CMS.

Awards

Drupal has won the CNET Webware 100 award in the publishing category for the third year running (2007, 2008, 2009) The Webware 100 Awards recognise the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, CNET’s editors selected 300 finalists. But the Web’s users decided the final cut, voting nearly two million times to select the 100 top products—10 each in of 10 categories—from the list of 300 finalists. (Source: http://drupal.org/Drupal-wins-2008-webware-100-award). Other awards include:

• Packt Publishing 2008 Best Overall Open Source CMS
• Packt Publishing 2008 Best PHP Open Source CMS
• Packt Publishing 2007 Best Overall Open Source CMS