Drupal is somewhat different to traditional CMS systems or blogging platforms, as it works with abstract ‘content’ rather than pages or posts. A piece of content in Drupal can be almost anything, but is typically a person, video, post, image or news item; however it is rarely a page. Pages in Drupal are often created by aggregating content in a predefined layout. This allows the designer to enforce the design across the site, but release the editing of the content to the client. It also means adding content is very straight forward. For example to add a video simply click ‘Add Video’ and it is added to any page that has been defined to show this type of content. Similarly ‘Add News Item’, ‘Add Person’ etc will place the content on the relevant page without asking the editor to make decisions regarding design. In Drupal the design and layout is separated from the content.
As content is abstract, e-commerce can be added to Drupal. Products are set-up in the same way as any other type of content, and core modules are used to add the e-commerce pages and functionality (e.g. Shopping Cart and Checkout).
One final great feature of Drupal is the Imagecache. Imagecache is a server-side component that reformats images to predefined styles. Therefore, any image can be uploaded into the CMS and it will resize, crop, add drop-shadow, turn to greyscale etc. This means that you are not relying on a client to know how to process an image; this can all be setup in advance.
Drupal is free, flexible, robust and constantly being improved by hundreds of thousands of passionate people from all over the world. Join us!
