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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 core is the “stock” installation of Drupal, which can be optionally extended by third party contributions. In Drupal’s default configuration, website content can be contributed by either registered or anonymous users (at the discretion of the administrator) and made accessible to web visitors by a variety of selectable criteria including by date, category, searches, etc. Drupal core also includes a hierarchical taxonomy system, which allows content to be categorized or “tagged” with key words for easier access.

Drupal maintains a detailed of core feature updates by version.

Core modules

Drupal core includes “core modules” which can be enabled by the administrator to extend the functionality of the core website.

The core Drupal distribution provides a number of features, including:

• Access statistics and logging
• Advanced search functions
• Caching and feature throttling for improved performance under load
• Comments, forums, and polls
• Descriptive URLs (for example, “www.example.com/products” rather than “www.example.com/?q=node/432″)
• Multi-level menu system
• Multi-site support
• Multi-user content creation and editing
• support
• RSS Feed and Feed Aggregator
• Security/new release update notification
• User profiles
• Various access control restrictions (user roles, IP addresses, email)
• Workflow tools (Triggers and Actions)

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including …..

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

All VERSION-NEXT cPanel hosting accounts include Fantastico Deluxe, which is an automated installer for many opensource applications. Using Fantastico make it simple to install Drupal into your hosting account, you just need to supply some basic information and with a few mouse clicks Drupal is installed and you are ready to start adding content.

You can can view our demo Drupal site, by clicking on the thumbnail image to the right.

The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

• Content Management Systems
• Blogs
• Collaborative authoring environments
• Forums
• Peer-to-peer networking
• Newsletters
• Podcasting
• Picture galleries
• File uploads and downloads

Plus much more!

As Drupal can be used for many different types of websites like, Community web portals, Discussion sites, Corporate web sites, Intranet applications, Personal web sites or blogs, E-commerce applications, Resource directories and Social Networking sites. It comes with a large set of features to enable it to be used for many types of applications.

You can can view our demo Drupal site, which shows some of these features, by clicking on the thumbnail image to the right.

General features

Collaborative Book – Our unique collaborative book feature lets you setup a “book” and then authorize other individuals to contribute content.

Friendly URLs – Drupal uses Apache’s mod_rewrite to enable customizable URLs that are both user and search engine friendly.

Modules – The Drupal community has contributed many modules which provide functionality that extend Drupal core.

Role based permission system – Drupal administrators don’t have to tediously setup permissions for each user. Instead, they assign permissions to roles and then group like users into a role group.

Searching – All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times if you take advantage of the built in search module.

User management

User authentication – Users can register and authenticate locally or using an external authentication source like Jabber, Blogger, LiveJournal or another Drupal website. For use on an intranet, Drupal can integrate with an LDAP server.

Content management

Polls – Drupal comes with a poll module which enables admins and/or users to create polls and show them on various pages.

Templating – Drupal’s theme system separates content from presentation allowing you to control the look and feel of your Drupal site. Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP coding meaning that you don’t have to learn a proprietary templating language.

Threaded comments – Drupal provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum.

Version control – Drupal’s version control system tracks the details of content updates including who changed it, what was changed, the date and time of changes made to your content and more. Version control features provide an option to keep a comment log and enables you to roll-back content to an earlier version.

Blogging

Blogger API support – The Blogger API allows your Drupal site to be updated by many different tools. This includes non-web browser based tools that provide a richer editing environment.

Content syndication – Drupal exports your site’s content in RDF/RSS format for others to gather. This lets anyone with a News Aggregator browse your Drupal sites feeds.

News aggregator – Drupal has a powerful built-in News Aggregator for reading and blogging news from other sites. The News Aggregator caches articles to your MySQL database and its caching time is user configurable.

Note: This prevents losing track of your news as in other aggregators when you’re offline for a few days. detailed information

Permalinks – All content created in Drupal has a permanent link or “perma link” associated with it so people can link to it freely without fear of broken links.

Administration and Analysis

Analysis, Tracking and Statistics – Drupal can print browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate your site.

Logging and Reporting – All important activities and system events are captured in an event log to be reviewed by an administrator at a later time. screenshot .

Web based administration – Drupal can be administered entirely using a web browser, making it possible to access it from around the world and requires no additional software to be installed on your computer.

Community features

Discussion forums – Full discussion forum features are built into Drupal to create lively, dynamic community sites.

Performance and scalability

Caching – The caching mechanism eliminates database queries increasing performance and reducing the server’s load. Not only can the caching be tuned in real time, while your site is under load, but it has been successfully tested under a “slashdotting” and performed extremely well.

Once you have your Drupal site up and running, the first thing you will most likely want to do is change the look of the site to suit your needs. Fortunately Drupal uses themes, which simplifies the process. There are many themes available for download from the drupal.org site and many other sites. Being opensource, there is a large community of people world-wide who contribute theme and modules that are free to use.

You can can view our demo Drupal site, which uses a customized theme, by clicking on the thumbnail image to the right.

Once you have located the theme you wish to use, follow the steps below to install your new theme.

1. Download the theme – Make sure the version of the theme matches your version of Drupal. Note that themes labeled “CVS” or “DEV” are in a development stage. They may be written for a previous/current/future version of Drupal, and they are considered unstable and should be handled with care.
2. Extract the files – When you first get the theme, it will appear in a compressed file format such as ‘tar.gz’. On Windows, use a program like 7-Zip to extract it. On the Mac, you can use Stuffit Expander. You should now see a list of files extracted into a folder.
3. Upload the folder – FTP/Copy your files (including the folder from the previous step) to the desired themes folder in your Drupal installation. Themes are stored in the “/themes” folder
4. Read the directions – If the theme has an installation file (usually INSTALL.txt and/or README.txt), read it for specific instructions. There are some themes that require special treatment to function properly.
5. Enable the theme – To enable the theme go to Administer > Site building > Themes. Check the ‘Enabled’ box next to the theme and then click the ‘Save Configuration’ button at the bottom.

NOTE:

You can add extra functionality to your Drupal site with Modules. The standard install of Drupal comes with many modules that can be enabled via Administer > Site Building > Modules. There are also many 3rd party modules available from the drupal.org site. Being opensource, there is a large community of people world-wide who contribute themes and modules for Drupal that are free to use.

You can can view our demo Drupal site, which shows examples of module use, by clicking on the thumbnail image to the right.

Once you have located your new module, follow the steps below to install and activate the module.

1. Download the module – Make sure the version of the module matches your version of Drupal. Note that modules labeled “CVS” or “DEV” are in a development stage. They may be written for a previous/current/future version of Drupal, and they are considered unstable and should be handled with care.
2. Extract the files – When you first get the module, it will appear in a compressed file format such as ‘tar.gz’. On Windows, use a program like 7-Zip to extract it. On the Mac, you can use Stuffit Expander. You should see a list of files extracted into a Folder.
3. Upload the folder – FTP/Copy/SCP your files to the desired modules folder in your Drupal installation. The usual location is the modules/ directory of your Drupal installation.
4. Read the directions – If the module has an installation file (usually INSTALL.txt and/or README.txt), read it for specific instructions. There are modules that require special treatment, and even modules that depend on other downloaded files to function properly. Sometimes the readme filename has no .txt extension. When you try to double-click on it, your computer doesn’t know what program to use. Use your favorite text editor.
5. Enable the module – Go to Administer > Site building > Modules. Check the ‘Enabled’ box next to the module and then click the ‘Save Configuration’ button at the bottom. NOTE: If you’re upgrading an existing module you’ll need to browse to your update page at www.example.com/update.php and click on ‘run the database upgrade script’.
6. Set permissions – Some modules will require you to change permissions or settings to get them working. Permissions and settings info may be in the instructions that came with the module. Usually, go to Administer > Users > Access control. Scroll down to see if the module appears in the list and, if it does, give the appropriate permissions to the appropriate roles.
7. Adjust settings – Where will depend on the module you installed.

Standard Drupal modules include:

Aggregator — Aggregates syndicated content (RSS, RDF, and Atom feeds).

Blog — Enables keeping easily and regularly updated user web pages or blogs.

Blog API — Allows users to post content using applications that support XML RPC blog API.

Book — Allows users to collaboratively author a book.

Color — Allows the user to change the color scheme of certain themes.

Comment — Allows users to comment on and discuss published content.

Contact — Enables the use of both personal and sitewide contact forms.

Forum — Enables threaded discussions about general topics.

Help — Manages the display of online help.

Legacy — Provides legacy handlers for upgrades from older Drupal installations.

Locale — Enables the translation of the user interface to languages other than English.

Menu — Allows administrators to customize the site navigation menu.

Path — Allows users to rename URLs.

Ping — Alerts other sites when your site has been updated.

Poll — Allows your site to capture votes on different topics in the form of multiple choice questions.

Profile — Supports configurable user profiles.

Search — Enables site-wide keyword searching.

Statistics — Logs access statistics for your site.

Taxonomy — Enables the categorization of content.

Throttle — Handles the auto-throttling mechanism, to control site congestion.

Tracker — Enables tracking of recent posts for users.

Upload — Allows users to upload and attach files to content.

Drupal 5.3 has been released by the good people at drupal.org and can be downloaded from the Drupal project download section. This is a maintenance release that fixes several bugs, as well as some security vulnerabilities.

It is strongly recommended that you upgrade to Drupal 5.3, to avoid leaving your site open to exploits through the security vulnerabilities of earlier versions.

Upgrading your Drupal site involves three basic steps:

1. Back up your existing site and database.
2. Download and unzip the new Drupal files to your server.
3. Run the update.php script, which will update your database.

You can can view our demo Drupal site which has been upgraded to Drupal 5.3 using this method, by clicking on the thumbnail image to the right.

However, to make your update run as smoothly as possible, there are various preparations that experienced Drupal users do to guarantee the least frustrating upgrade and minimal interruption to their users.

NOTE: You should check to see if the contributed modules you rely on have been upgraded as well. Old versions of modules will not run on an upgraded version of Drupal (e.g 4.7 modules do not work on a Drupal 5.x site).

Preparing the site for upgrade.

Complete the following steps to prepare your site for upgrading:

• Login as USER 1, the root user, the very first account created when Drupal was installed. If you cannot login as the root user, you will need to modify the update.php script once you load the new files for your site.
• Turn off all modules that are not core modules:
  Administer >> Modules
• Also, switch your theme back to the default theme (‘BlueMarine’ in 4.7 and lower, ‘Garland’ in 5.x):
  Administer >> Themes
• As an extra precaution, it is a good idea to put the site offline while you perform the upgrade
  Administer > Site Configuration > Site Maintenance

Downloading Drupal and installing the files

I. Download and unzip the latest Drupal release to your desktop.

You can download drupal at the Downloads page. You can use unzipping software such as WinZip or Stuffit.

II. Move your old Drupal files

You made a backup, right? Using your FTP client, move all your old Drupal files on your server to backup directory. If you are upgrading a test site, move your test site files. It is considered best practice to remove the old files completely rather than overwriting to ensure you have a clean installation of the new files.

III. Upload the new version of Drupal

Using your FTP client, upload the new version of Drupal to the same place where your old files were located. If you are upgrading a test site, upload the files to your test site directory.

Make sure your files directory is writable.

IV. Upload contributed modules

Again with your FTP client, upload the new version of all your contributed modules. Make sure you have the version of the module which matches your new Drupal version.

V. Copy over necessary files from the ‘backup’ copy directory

Using your FTP client, copy the following files from your ‘backup’ directory to the Drupal directory on your server:

• .htaccess
• sites/default/settings.php
• the ‘files’ directory
• any other files you need from the ‘backup’ directory

Running update.php

If you have previously determined that you do not need to update your database, you may skip the following step. However, it does not hurt to run the update.php script just to verify whether or not a database update is necessary. Just make sure that you have made a backup of your database first.

I. Did you login as USER 1?

Previously, you were asked to login as USER 1, the root user, the first user created on your Drupal site. If you were not able to do so, you will need to edit the update.php script in a text editor. Otherwise, you will not be permitted to update the database. Change TRUE to FALSE for the $access_check statement like so:

$access_check = FALSE;

After you complete the upgrade, be sure to CHANGE the update.php file BACK TO ITS ORIGINAL STATE if you have made this change. Otherwise, anyone would be able to run the update.php file on your site.

II. Run update.php

In your web browser navigate to the directory where Drupal is installed:

http://www.example.com/update.php

or
http://www.example.com/test_site/update.php (if you are upgrading a test site)

The update script should only be run once. It will complete all the updates at once. If prompted for which version, choose the closest starting version that makes sense for you.

This will update the default Drupal and contributed module database tables automatically (versions prior to 4.7 will require manual upgrade of the contributed modules). Once the script has stopped loading, be sure to scroll to the bottom to look for errors.

Post-upgrade steps

Congratulations! You have completely upgraded your Drupal installation.

You should now go to your Administer > Site building > Modules page and enable new modules from your upgrade. Be sure to then go to Administer > Users > Access control to get enable permissions to use that module for different roles.

The last step in an upgrade is to delete or move the following files from your site:

• install.php
• CHANGELOG.txt
• INSTALL.txt
• LICENSE.txt
• MAINTAINERS.txt
• UPGRADE.txt

Your Drupal site is now running on 5.3, it is always a good idea to check through you site for any errors. This is especially important if you have made a lot of customizations to Drupal.