Interesting Things About Drupal You Should Know

By factober Updated on July 25, 2021

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Interesting facts about Drupal

The name Drupal represents an English rendering of the Dutch word druppel, which means “drop”.
Drupal is a free and open-source web content management framework (CMF).
Drupal is written in PHP.
Drupal is distributed under the GNU General Public License.
More than 13% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide are using Drupal to power their backend. That includes personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites.
Drupal can be used for building knowledge management and business collaboration systems.
Drupal was originally developed by Dries Buytaert.
Now, Drupal is developed and maintained by the Drupal community.
Drupal was initially released on January 15, 2001.
Drupal’s latest stable release is 9.1.6 as of 2021-04-07.
Drupal is written in PHP. It uses a lot of components from Symfony Framework. Symfony is a PHP web application framework and a set of reusable PHP components/libraries. It was published as free software on October 18, 2005, and released under the MIT license.
As of writing this post in March 2021, the Drupal community consists of more than 1.39 million members.
As of March 2021, Drupal has more than 121,000 active contributors.
As of March 2021, Drupal has more than 46,800 free modules that extend and customize its functionality. Modules are like building blocks that when installed make new features available.
As of March 2021, Drupal has over 2,900 free themes that change the look and feel of Drupal.
As of March 2021, Drupal has at least 1,300 free distributions that allow users to quickly and easily set up a complex, use-specific Drupal in minimum steps.
The Drupal core contains basic features common to content-management systems, such as user account registration and maintenance, menu management, RSS feeds, taxonomy, page layout customization, and system administration.
The Drupal core can be used to build a single or multi-user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website supported by user-generated content.
Drupal meets most of the generally accepted feature requirements for general-purpose web frameworks.
Drupal offers a sophisticated API for developers. That can be used to easily extend the existing Drupal functionality.
It was originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board.
The name Drupal comes from the now-defunct Drop.org website, whose code slowly evolved into Drupal.
Drupal 7’s end-of-life was scheduled for November 2021, but given the impact of COVID-19, the end of life has been pushed back until November 28, 2022.
Drupal 8 will still be end-of-life on November 2, 2021.
Drupal 10’s initial release schedule is on July 2022.
Drupal depends on third-party software components, many of which will go end-of-life (EOL) in the next few years. When a component goes EOL, it will no longer receive security support.
The “Drupal 10 Readiness” initiative will focus on upgrading the third-party components. Not only does this keep Drupal secure, but it also allows us to take advantage of any new capabilities that come with these updated components.
One of the most important features to complete is our modern front-end theme, Olivero. While there has been a lot of progress in this area, Olivero does not ship with Drupal yet. We expect Drupal 10 to ship with this modern theme.
“Drupal core” refers to the collaboratively built codebase that can be extended through contributory modules.
Drupal core is made up of the Common Drupal-specific libraries, as well as the bootstrap process.
Drupal isolates core files from contributed modules and themes.
Drupal core includes modules that can be enabled by the administrator to extend the functionality of the core website.
For versions prior to 8, the “Drupal core” is kept outside of the “sites” folder of its installation.
Starting with version 8, the Drupal core is kept in its own ‘core’ sub-directory.
The Drupal community has the saying, “Never hack core,” a strong recommendation that site developers do not change core files.
The Drupal core has been designed to be modular, so there should be no reason to hack it. If there is a feature you want and it cannot be accomplished outside of modifying the core, consider submitting your hack as a patch.
In a Drupal website’s default configuration, authors can contribute content as either registered or anonymous users.
The Drupal distribution provides a number of features. Such as Access statistics and logging, Advanced search Books, comments, and forums, Caching, lazy-loading content (using BigPipe) and feature throttling for improved performance Custom content type and fields, and user interface to create, manage, and display lists of content.
The core Drupal distribution also provides features such as Descriptive URLs, Multi-level menu system, Multi-site support, Multi-user content creation and editing RSS feed and feed aggregator, Security, and new release update notification, User profiles, Various access control restrictions (user roles, IP addresses, email), Workflow tools (triggers and actions).
Drupal includes default core themes, such as Garland and Bartik. These core themes can be used to customize the “look and feel” of Drupal sites.
The Color Module was introduced in Drupal core 5.0. With this module, the administrators can change the color scheme of certain themes via a browser interface.
Drupal localization is built on top of gettext, the GNU internationalization, and localization (i18n) library. The gettext is an internationalization and localization (i18n and l10n) system commonly used for writing multilingual programs on Unix-like computer operating systems.
Drupal can automatically notify the administrator about new versions of modules, themes, or the Drupal core.
Drupal 6 introduced an abstraction layer that allowed programmers to create SQL queries without writing SQL.
Drupal 9 extends the data abstraction layer so that a programmer no longer needs to write SQL queries as text strings. It uses PHP Data Objects to abstract the database.
Drupal 7 supports the file-based SQLite database engine, which is part of the standard PHP distribution. SQLite is a relational database management system (RDBMS) contained in a C library.
Drupal has fully-featured web accessibility. It is a good framework for building sites accessible to people with disabilities because many of the best practices have been incorporated into Drupal Core.
Drupal core is modular, defining a system of hooks and callbacks, which are accessed internally via an API.
The current Drupal API architecture allows third-party contributed modules and themes to extend or override its default behaviors without changing the core’s code.
Drupal contributed modules offer such additional or alternate features as image galleries, custom content types and content listings, WYSIWYG editors, private messaging, third-party integration tools.
Drupal module Content Construction Kit (CCK): allows site administrators to dynamically create content types by extending the database schema.
Drupal Views: facilitates the retrieval and presentation, through a database abstraction system, of content to site visitors. Basic views functionality has been added to core in Drupal 8.