FREE WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM

Drupal is a free, open source website development platform written in PHP. It is used as a "back end" system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites.

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, administration menus, RSS-feeds, customizable layout, flexible account privileges, logging, a blogging system, an Internet forum, and options to create a classic "brochureware" website or an interactive community website.

Drupal was also designed to allow new features and custom behavior to be added by third parties. For this reason, Drupal is sometimes described as a "content management framework". Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.

Drupal can run on any computing platform that supports:

• a web server capable of running PHP (version 4.3.5+), including Apache, IIS, Lightpd, and nginx.
• a database, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, to store content and settings

Drupal's popularity is growing rapidly. Over 70 well-known brand names and not-for-profit organizations now use Drupal.

http://drupal.org/