As already mentioned, Drupal is derived from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word "druppel" which stands for "drop", the name of the drop.org community. Drupal's nickname of "Community Plumbing" has a parallel etymology: the word plumbing relates to water, from there to drop.

The drop metaphor is a useful framework for thinking about Drupal and social software design. Social software depends on self-organizing networks using the packet-based, end-to-end design of the Internet. Some of the social plumbing of Drupal that facilitates networked connections between Drupal sites includes

Within software development organizations, "eating your own dog food" denotes the common practice of an organization using the application that they design. This has obvious marketing implications: i.e., despite vocal criticism of open source applications, Microsoft appeared hypocritical for using FreeBSD, a Unix variant, to run their Hotmail web servers.

Beyond marketing, eating your own dog food has more direct effects on the design of the application itself. In the open source community, because so many contributors originally join a project to scratch their own itch, we suspect that most Linux developers use Linux, Mozilla developers Mozilla, OpenOffice.org developers OpenOffice, and so forth. Some critics of open source software have complained about the "developer-as-user," that open source software is too geek-centric and less sensitive to the needs of regular users for this reason. However, by using the application regularly for the purposes for which it is intended, there is less disconnect between users and developers simply because developers are users. Developers discover bugs, observe UI difficulties, and find common task and usage patterns. They gain a better understanding of user complaints and needs which leads to better prioritization in future development.

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.

In the summer of 2003, we worked on creating a general description of Drupal--an open source content management system (CMS)--for the "About Drupal" page on drupal.org. While Drupal is clearly within the class of applications known as content management systems, we felt that to describe it with that term alone would not present a clear picture of the breadth and range of Drupal's capabilities. Thus, the final description ended up describing Drupal with a total of four characteristics, although notably not distinct:

• content management
• weblog
• discussion-based community software
• collaboration

Recently, weblogs have been described as CMS's. Discussion-based features are common in CMS's. And collaboration is typically facilitated through some workflow process on most CMS's.