Drupal is best described as a full-featured open source content management system (CMS). CMS's are a set of applications which include Plone, PHP-Nuke, Xaraya, Nucleus CMS, and Mambo, among others. These CMS's provide a broad selection of modules for implementing a variety of website designs, differentiating them from proprietary learning management systems with which many educators are more familiar-- Blackboard and WebCT--CMS's particularly tailored for online learning and course administration. Similarly, proprietary and open source weblogs software applications such as MovableType, Blogger, and WordPress are blogcentric in their feature set and design (although, notably, blog software continues to evolve toward a more robust design and feature set). So for the purpose of this discussion, while learning management systems and weblog software do support content management, we will restrict the term content management system to refer to their more full-featured cousins.

Even among CMS's, there are obvious differences. For example, consider Plone and Drupal. Both systems have much in common, and yet they each have their own particular strengths:

• Plone is the layer on top of Zope, an object-oriented application server. The fact that Plone runs on a full-featured application server is important for many enterprise-class applications/solutions and may make it better for some corporate or large organizational needs. Drupal on the other hand will run on nearly all Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python (LAMP) systems, the operating system, web server, database management, and programming language environments that represents the majority of web platforms of today.
• Plone implements XML through Dublin Core metadata elements; Drupal has no standard XML implementation for creating and posting content. Given the inclusion of the Dublin Core standard, Plone has gained popularity among distance educators interested in building and using learning objects.
• Unlike Drupal, Plone is not so much for individuals (like a computer hobbyist) or small groups who want to setup a website. Plone has a steeper learning curve because it requires more work and know-how to get a site up and running, and to get the best out of it. One key difference is that cheap and reliable Zope hosting is difficult to find because a Plone site can be resource-hungry (eg. requires much RAM).

Like most of the conventional/traditional content management features found in other CMS software, Drupal offers a GUI-based interface to edit content, a categorization system to organize content, support for WYSIWYG editors, content versioning, workflow support, a fine-grained permission scheme, file management, flexible user management with configurable roles and permissions, and so on. Yet, what sets Drupal apart from the many other content managements systems is its unique focus on collaboration and community. From the ground up Drupal has been designed to be a communication and discussion--and now collaboration--engine encouraging user interaction through forums, blogs, open moderation queues, etc. This can be traced back to the fact that Drupal was originally developed as a webboard/advalvas for use in a student dorm.

A Community from the Very Beginning

In 2000, permanent Internet connections were at a premium for University of Antwerp students so Dries and Hans Snijder setup a wireless bridge between their student dorms to share Hans's ADSL modem connection among eight students. While this was an extremely luxurious situation at that time, something was missing. There was no means to discuss or share simple things. That inspired Dries to work on a small news site with a built-in webboard, allowing the group of friends to leave each other notes about the status of the network, to announce where they were having dinner, or to share some noteworthy news items.

The software did not have a name until the day after Dries moved out after graduation. The group decided to put the internal website online so that they could stay in touch, continue to share interesting findings, and narrate snippets of their personal lives. While looking for an appropriate domain name, Dries settled for 'drop.org' after he made a typo to see if the the name 'dorp.org' was still available. Dorp is the Dutch word for 'village', which was considered an appropriate name for the small community.

Once established on the Web, drop.org's audience changed as the members began talking about new web technologies such as moderation, syndication, rating, and distributed authentication. Drop.org slowly turned into a personal experimentation environment for its members, driven by the discussions and flow of ideas. The discussions about these web technologies were tried out on drop.org itself as new additions to the software running the site. It was only later, in January 2001, that Dries decided to release the software behind drop.org as "Drupal." The motivating factor was to enable others to use and extend the experimentation platform so that more people could explore new paths for development. The name Drupal, pronounced "droo-puhl," is derived from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word "druppel" which stands for "drop."

More Social Software than Content Management

In the following years, Drupal has slowly grown from a monolithic piece of software to a modular piece of software, and from having a technical elite audience to being accessible to people that have basic knowledge about websites. Today, with over 250 active software developers, Drupal is more than just a simple communication tool; it is a platform. It is extensible, has a database abstraction layer, runs on a number of web servers, separates content from presentation, features a localization system, offers advanced content categorization. More importantly, from a social software perspective, Drupal can be seen as supporting the three common characteristics of social software described by Stowe Boyd:

• Conversational interaction between individuals or groups. Boyd explains that conversational interaction can occur through both asynchronous and synchronous electronic communication applications. Drupal provides all of the most common of these functions--weblogs, discussion forums, polls, private messaging, commenting, email notification and mailing modules, chatrooms, contact and feedback forms, etc.--as well as some that support networked activity--trackback, RSS, and news aggregation. The tracking module and sidebar blocks such as recent comments, who's online, who's new, active forum topics, and most recent blog posts enable community members of a site to track and see active conversations. Some features are specifically collaborative in design and purpose: i.e., the project module, the application used by the Drupal community to submit, track, and discuss bug and feature requests; the wiki-like collaborative book which allows groups to create and revise an online text.
• Social feedback. Individuals are invariably motivated to build social capital (Rheingold), or whuffie (Doctorow), through their interaction online. Certainly, the applications listed for the previous category fit into this one, but there are additional applications that are specifically designed to rate a persons contributions to discussion. Drupal provides a Slashdot-like karma system for rating comments and a node moderation system which allows a community of users to select which individual blog posts should be featured on the front page of the site.
• Social networks. Users are increasingly making use of the Internet to engage in self-organizing social network activities on sites like Google's Orkut and Friendster. Drupal social network features include FOAF, Drupal distributed authentication ID, folksonomy, avatar support, customizable user profiles, etc.