By Catheryne Hunte
One of the key reasons Brightlemon finally chose Drupal for it's social networking development was the research made by a team at IBM comparing and contrasting a number of open source content management systems (please see http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/osource/index.html).
Open source
Drupal is a content management system that uses an open source community for development. The system evolves around the use of modules, themes and translator tools that can be shared across the World Wide Web for free. The Drupal platform includes:
- Themes - that are customisable for the design of the website.
- Modules - allow for basic and additional functionality of a website
- Mysql database - stores all the data for the website
Easy development of social networking sites
For websites that require more complex functions such as social networking sites, Drupal allows these functions to be implemented without having to code from scratch. However, it is important for developers to have some knowledge of PHP, HTML and CSS.
Help and support
One of the major benefits of using Drupal is the vast amount of documented help and support available. The type of support available include bug reports, books about Drupal and security. Other forms of help include:
- Handbooks - to aid the development of the website
- Forums - for questions and answers to common problems
- Contact -to contact the Drupal team
Contributions
For those that wish to contribute to the Drupal platform, there are guidelines and help to enable programmers to achieve this. This capability means that companies wishing to develop a website using a different theme of function will have it at their fingertips.
Useful links:
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