Drupal Overview

Brief History & Future

• Started in 1999, Public as drop.org in 2000, 2001 January 15th 1.0 release
• Top tier CMS/Community system, secondary for pure "blog" or "forum" site, RAD framework
• No Roadmap: Mission, Values, Personal Battle Plans and Predictions
• 500+ developers involved in core, 800+ involved in contrib, GPLv2 only
• 600+ modules, 250+ themes in official repository

System Requirements

• 4.7, 5.x and Drupal6 (dev):
  • PHP4.3+
  • MySQL4.0
  • PgSQL7.3+
• 7.0 (next year)
  • PHP5.x+ only
  • MySQL4.1+ (?)
  • PgSQL7.3+ (?)
  • Oracle? SQLServer?, DB2?, SQLite?

Demo

• Installation
• Demonstration of Front & Back End
• Feature overview

CMS Architecture - Pretty

CMS Architecture

• Design paradigm - Extensible core
• Use cases- Multi User, interactive, RAD
• User model - Users, extensible roles/access
• Multilanguage - core of Drupal6 (review)
• Template - MVC, PHPTemplate, Smarty, Xtemplate, Zengine

CMS Architecture - Security

• DB Abstraction protects against SQL injection
• XSS protected against as part of translation and theme layer
• FormAPI - XSFR protected with with session+salt hash hidden form elements
• FormAPI - Prevent submission of non existent radio/select options
• Generally, "I love finding custom CMS because I know I can break into it. If I see Drupal and its up to date I just give up." - paraphrase of Rasmus Lerdorf

Extension Development

• Modules and Themes and Profiles and Translations (Oh my!)
• Hooks and Overrides
• User system, Access control system, Menu system, Taxonomy system, Content system, Form system, i18n and l10n system
• S5 Module
• Views module

Case Studies

• Simple/minimal implementation example(s)
  • Blog site: Wanderlusting
  • Photo Blog: Scattered Sunshine, Buytaert Photos
  • Neighborhood Forum with Calendar: WWPNA
  • Simple Advocacy: Earth Day

Conclusion

• Pros: yes
• Cons: slower than static html if you have few pages with unchanging content and massive traffic.