Drupal

It's a PHP-based Content Management System/Framewor that became open source (GPLv2) in 2001.

Use cases

It's used by a wide variety of organisations for a large number of purposes, including;

whitehouse.gov, economist.com, grammy.com, pythonline.com, ubuntu.com, mtv.co.uk, warnerbrothersrecords.com, popsci.com, appdeveloper.intel.com, research.yahoo.com, corp.aol.com ...

Orientation

Drupal started out way back when as a forum system, but has evolved into a strong middle-of-the-road CMS/F. Its power lies in a well-balanced module ecosystem and breadth of development community. There are a variety of interworking levels of abstraction within the Drupal framework. A lot of modules have their own hooks that other modules can work with, building a network of possibilities.

Articles

The Drupal Learning Curve: a configurators view - A good overview of techniques and modules Drupal users will most likely learn over time.
Drupal deployments & workflows with version control, drush_make, and Aegir - Using Drush, the Drupal cli management/scripting tool, and Aegir, the Drupal based development and hosting system.
Using Drush Make - building a base Drupal installation through automation

Drupal programming from an object-oriented perspective

Videos

What you can do with Drupal from the administration perspective: Summary of Site Building with Drupal
How Drupal themes and modules output things at the code level: Overview of Template.php from Advanced Theming for Drupal
(A really great module for Drupal developers: Using the Drupal Theme Developer Tool: Theming Basics for Drupal)
How to create content types with input fields: Adding a CCK Field: Learning CCK for Drupal
How to display content nodes using Views: Views 2 Overview
Using URLs to filter Views output: Using Views Arguments in Drupal
How to use Panels 3 and override node add/edit pages: Drupal Panels 3
Accessing external data sources (APIs on other sites) & Semantic Views: Drupalcon Copenhagen: Views 3
Drupalcon Copenhagen: 15 modules to help you build a community website
Drupalcon Copenhagen: Connect Drupal

Modules

Worthwhile modules, imho. And don't forget OpenID!

Core non-core

Development

Admin

Management

admin of submitted unpublished nodes, updating coordinator contact info, etc

GUI

Nodes

http://drupal.org/project/nodequeue

Content

Images

Events

Taxonomy

Social

DiSo, etc

SEO

Performance

Security

Internationalisation

Data Portability, OStatus, etc

http://activismlabs.org/

july 2010

august 2010