In preparation for each new NFL season, every team strives to sign players who are some combination of bigger, stronger, and faster than those who are currently on their roster. A similar quest is continuously taking place among those groups who attempt to provide systems for creating websites. A content management system called Drupal, which is now on version 7, is the tool that is leading the way in all of these areas.

Bigger. Unlike proprietary software, where its creation and maintenance are handled by a finite group of people who work for the corporation, Drupal as open source software allows all of those who use it to be involved in the process of enhancing it. The following list is just a sampling of some of the ways in which this is expressed:
• Individuals can contribute actual source code to the Drupal project itself through modules.
• Members of drupal.org help each other troubleshoot issues on the site’s forum and keep documentation updated.
• User groups meet locally to discuss and give presentations about various aspects of Drupal.

Stronger. Since 2001, when founder Dries Buytaert started what is now Drupal, the community has helped build up its infrastructure to allow websites to be generated with greater ease of administration, navigation, and content creation, as well as greater security, making it a very robust tool.

Faster. Imagine that you had a 500-piece puzzle to put together. That would take you a long time to do, wouldn’t it ?? Now imagine that the center 100 pieces came already assembled out of the box. And imagine that 4 of your friends had come over in the middle of the night and assembled the other groups of 100 pieces for each corner. Then all you would need to do is put the 5 chunks together and you are done. This would be analogous to building a website from scratch with HTML versus using Drupal !! Of course, assuming that you are not someone who enjoys spending hours putting puzzles together, you would choose to take advantage of Drupal for the speed with which you could construct a website.

There are many options out there today for planting and growing websites but we believe that Drupal is simply the best. Going forward, this series of blog posts will help you learn the basics of Drupal so that you can feel comfortable building your own websites using the Drupal platform.