Before reading this post ask yourself: “Do you know what Drupal is?” If yes, you are at the wrong place. If no, (even though it’s a sin to not have heard of Drupal) sing “Hallelujah”.
Drupal is a Content Management System aka CMS. (In fact, it is so powerful that it is commonly referred to as a ‘Content Management Framework’, but that’s not for beginners). Content Management System is a software that you install (generally) on your domain to manage content (over a website). In short, Drupal is a software that will help you in making ‘pure-awesomeness’ websites quickly – by removing all the overheads of coding, maintaining, security etc and giving you freedom to write quality content. Savvy?
Sample this: You are creating your website that talks about you as a person, as a professional, a photo gallery of your last trip to Manali, downloads of nifty softwares written by you, and your blog. Imagine coding this. Easy? Not so easy. Install Drupal, make some configurations, write content and you will be up and running in a couple of hours.
But be warned, Drupal has an initial learning curve (maybe not for small website like our example, but definitely for huge, complex websites), but the good news is that the initial time that you invest in learning how to work in Drupal, gives you manifold returns in performance.
Also, Drupal is open source. What that means is that thousands of developers are working around the globe in making the software better and better. What it also means is that if there is a feature that you need and Drupal doesn’t have (which is a very rare occurrence, if ever), you can open up your favourite IDE, write the PHP code (Drupal is written in PHP, and requires a LAMP stack), and add the functionality. You can also contribute the functionality back to the community as a module (do follow the Drupal Standards while coding, else the community would reject the contribution, more of it later). So, its robust, scalable, efficient and awesome.
Oh, and by the way – Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez use Drupal. So does Firefox, and MTV, and Warner Bros Music, and many more.