If you spend a lot of time surfing through the different websites of communities, companies, and individuals, you will notice that all these sites have one thing in common: content. Content is not just limited to text, but all forms of graphics, videos, audio, and other web objects that form the website.

In order to supply content to the average website, experienced web designers need to code it from the ground up and test to see if it is working. With the exception of site creation wizards, just about all of the standard websites require manual editing for content to be added. Even if a template is used to make things easier, you still need to fill it with content and that means more coding or using a webpage editor.

Not everyone knows how to do this even if the one wanting to host the website has the necessary webpage creation tools installed in their computer. Hiring a professional or web design company is the only option, but that costs money and whenever updates are needed, they need to be contacted again unless a content management system is used instead. A content management system (CMS) provides an interface for users who do not know how to edit websites to add, remove, and edit content in their website easily.

The Existence of Drupal

This is where Drupal comes into the picture because Drupal is one of the earliest content management systems available for free. Because custom content management systems can take time to develop, Drupal gained a lot of attention in the web community and evolved into one of the most reliable packages out there. It is written in PHP so it can be used in different platforms for easy deployment.

The Main Features of Drupal

In addition to the standard features of an ordinary CMS, Drupal has its own registration system where users can have their own individual user accounts that the administrator can manage. Similar to a forum, administrators of a Drupal powered site can give special privileges to users such as access to areas that are not viewable by public. RSS feeds are supported as well making it ideal for setting it a news portal or blogging site. There are some forum capabilities as well so there is no need to install a separate forum solution. All of these elements can be set up without any knowledge in programming or web design.

Drupal’s default layout is nice, but the different themes that are offered in the Drupal site can also be used to give any site some taste. There are also a number of modules that can be hooked on to Drupal to add new features for special purposes.

The System Requirements of Drupal

Because Drupal is written in PHP, your webhost must have at least PHP version 4.3.5 although version 5.2 is recommended. The latest version – Drupal 6 requires MySQL 4.1 or greater and Apache web server 1.3 or Microsoft IIS 5 or 6 must be present.

If your host meets those requirements, you should be able to install Drupal on any webhost by following the instructions on their website.