Drupal is a content management system to publish, manage and organize many types of content in a web site. Drupal is an Open Source program, written in PHP and developped by a community. It is very popular thanks to its modularity and configurability. It is being used by many different types of web sites: enterprise, personal blogs, social networks, forums or e-commerce.

Advantages

The World Wide Web has become the main tool for communication, relationship and interchange of information for many companies and organizations. It is a must to have one (or several) web sites, easy to update and manage according to the changing needs. All too often these sites are implemented with expensive proprietary products, unnecessarily complex and rigid. Drupal shines through the quality of its code and the sites generated with it,, its respect for web standards and a focus on the usability and consistency of the whole system. Drupal's design is specially suited to build and manage internet communities. Its flexibilty and adaptability and the great number of additional modules available make Drupal the best choice to implement many diferent web types. Other advantages of Drupal are:

• Modularity
• Scalability
• Open Source, GNU/GPL license
• Multiplatform
• Easy to administer
• Extensible and programmable
• Customizable

Services

Clarcat provides all the services to deploy and use Drupal to its full potential:

• Installation, configuration and tunning
• Development of custom made modules
• Integration with the existing systems
• Support, maintenance and training
• Version update

Features

Drupal includes a great number of functions in the original product. New functions can be added by installing additional modules, created by Drupal's wide community. Custom modules can also be developed. Some of the main functions are:

• Open Source: the source code is available under the terms of the GNU/GPL license.
• Modules: the community has developed many modules: category page, private messages, bookmarks, etc.
• Customization: Drupal's core implements a powerful customization engine. Both content and presentation can be customized according the the preferences of each user.
• Friendly URLs: Drupal uses Apache's mod_rewrite to create URLs easy to manage both by the end user and the search engines.
• User management: the user can register and log in locally or using an external authentication system, such as Jabber, Blogger, LiveJournal or another Drupal site. If it is to be used in an intranet, Drupal can be integrated with a LDAP server.
• Role based permissions: Drupal's administrators do not need to set permissions for each user. The permissions can be assigned to a role and then group the users by roles.
• Content management: Drupal includes a mechanism for version control to keep track of the updates to the content. This mechanism includes comments on updates and allows backtracking to a previous version.
• Permalinks: every content created in Drupal has associated a permanent link that can be used by external web sites for reference in the future avoiding the problem of stale links.
• Content objects (Nodes): every content created in Drupal is an object (node). This structure allows the management of information consistently, such as the same mechanism to moderate content, to promote any object to the main page or to allow comments for each object.
• Templates: Drupal has a powerful theming system that separates contents from presentation to easily change the look of a web site. Templates can be created using HTML and/or PHP.
• Content syndication: Drupal exports content using RDF/RSS format. This feature allows to use any news aggregator, such as NetNewsWire or Radio UserLand to access web published content from any desktop or other web sites.
• Blogging news aggregator: Drupal includes a powerful news aggregator to read and publish links to other web sites content. It includes a database cache which refresh period can be configured.
• API Blogger support. The Blogger API allows a Drupal site to be updated by using several tools providing a friendly web or desktop edition environment.
• Database independent platform: although most of Drupal's installation use MySQL, there are other options. Drupal includes a database abstraction layer. This layer is implemented and suported for MySQL and PostgreSQL, but can be easily changed to support other databases.
• Multiplatform: Drupal has been designed to be multiplatform from the ground up. It can be used with Apache or Microsoft IIS and with Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OSX. Since Drupal is written in PHP it is fully portable.
• Multilanguage and localization: Drupal caters for an international audience and provides options to create a multilingual portal. All the content can be easily translated using a web interface, importing existing translations or integrating other translation tools suchs as GNU gettext.
• Administration: the system can be administered and configured with a browser, without the need for any additional software.
• Analysis and statistics: Drupal includes in the administrative pages many reports about referrals, number of accesses to content or how the users browse our web site.
• Logs and reports: all the activity and events from the system are logged in a log event that can be read by the administrator.
• Linked comments: Drupal provides a powerful model of linked comments that makes easy to follow and participate in the discussion on the published comment. The comments are hierarchical, such as in a newsgroup or forum.
• Polls: Drupal includes a module to create fully configurable polls by the administrators and users.
• Forums: Drupal includes discussion forums to create dynamic community sites.
• Collaborative writing: this feature is unique to Drupal and allows to create a project or "book" to be written in a collaborative way so that many users can contribute to its content. The content is organized in easily browsable pages.
• Performance and scalability: congestion control: Drupal includes a feature to control the congestion that allows enabling and disabling some modules or blocks according to the server's load. This mechanism is fully configurable.
• Cache system: the system cache reduces database queries thus increasing the performace by reducing the load of the server.