Learning the World

Drupal is an an open source content management platform. I’ve deployed it as a CMS to manage  Information Technology Services and Library web sites. It also powers my personal web site (Nuketown, not Learning the World)

As a CMS, it’s greatest strength is its extendability; it has a tremendous number of modules available for it and an active community supporting it. It’s biggest drawback has been its usability; power users are usually willing to work around its idiosycracies, but more casual users are easily frustrated by it.

The Drupal core development team has acknowledge this, and has been working hard to improve usability since Drupal 5, and it’s critical part of Drupal 7 development.

Essential Modules

Additional functionality is added to Drupal through the use of third-party modules. Of these, the most important (and most popular) are:

• Content Construction Kit (CCK): Allows you to create custom content types for Drupal. This allows you to have a dedicated content type for something like “Research Tools” that has its own special fields and taxonomy categories.
• Views: A critical tool for controlling the presentation of data within Drupal, Views allows you to build a variety of tables and lists from content in the Drupal database. You can then insert these views into sidebars and pages, or you can use them to replace Drupal’s existing lists (such as the home page’s list of current news stories)

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