PHP & Drupal
What Is .PHP?
Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages
For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document. As a general-purpose programming language, PHP code is processed by an interpreter application in command-line mode performing desired operating system operations and producing program output on its standard output channel. It may also function as a graphical application. PHP is available as a processor for most modern web servers and as standalone interpreter on most operating systems and computing platforms.
What is Drupal?
Drupal is a free and open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 1% of all websites worldwide, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites, including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.
The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to most CMSs. These include the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts within a role-based permission / privilege system, create and manage menus, RSS-feeds, customize page layout, perform logging, and administer the system. As installed, Drupal provides options to create a classic brochureware website, a single- or multi-user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for user-generated content.
Drupal was also designed to allow new features and custom behavior to be added to extend Drupal's core capabilities. This is done via installation of plug-in modules (known as contrib modules) created and contributed to the project by open source community members. For this reason, Drupal is sometimes described as a content management framework.[3] Drupal is also described as a web application framework, as it meets the generally accepted feature requirements for such frameworks.
Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.
Benefits of Drupal
All Content Management Systems (CMS) have forum and blog capabilities. They often have myriads of different modules that you can use to extend the system capabilities. So what unique features make Drupal so very special?
Drupal has vibrant and vivid community like no other CMS system. This is a point that makes Drupal very concurrent on the Content Management System’s market.
Drupal also has some unique features that make it very different and much more powerful then the most of other comparing software products (like open source solutions Plone, PostNuke, or PHPNuke, or commercial products like Microsoft SharePoint).
Some of those features are:
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Drupal is flexible and easy to extend
With Drupal, building an impressive website from scratch is simple and straight-forward. It requires less programming than the other CMS's. More than this, it is easier to add new features and even reshape Drupal website from a simple presentation site to a web application. You do not need to implement everything again from the scratch just to change something simple – you just make the change. -
Drupal is reliable, efficient and robust
Drupal is very well known for its meticulously crafted and well-designed code. The design structure empowers developers to write a code that uses the system resources wisely. This means the speed issues and concurrence problems are not likely to come into consideration in everyday work. Even more, patches or updates to a site can be done in a straight-forward manner, and updating existing Drupal system that follows a simple set of general rules usually take no more then one day to implement. -
Secret Weapon of Drupal No. 1: Security
Most of the people do not think that security is something that they should be bothered with. Unfortunatelly, they are wrong. There are people around this world that use their time and energy to attack web sites, and the consequences for you could range from loss of business to legal liability.
More about Security aspects of Drupal ... -
Secret Weapon of Drupal No. 2: Taxonomy
Modern organizational requirements moved their focus from simply managing data, to making content easy to find and retrieve. With increasing amount of information that are “somewhere” in the system, the problem of retrieving it is becoming crucial. The Taxonomy module is Drupal’s answer to this challenge.
More About the Power of Taxonomy ... -
Secret Weapon of Drupal No. 3: CCK & Views
Content Construction Kit is one of the modules for Drupal.
It allows you to define custom fields in your content types. For instance, you want to make a collection of famous quotations, and you want to track the author, the quotation and the source of that quotation. And Views can help you to create different lists of quotations: you can sort them alphabetically, or display only quotations of Winston Churchill etc.
More About the Power of CCK & Views ...
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