A Brief History of Drupal

In 2001, Drupal emerged as one of the primary open source CMS systems beginning with a message board module. The original inception of the software aimed to build community driven software that could power conversations, threads and content. Over the years, the project has rapidly involved to cover many more aspects of modern development, including dynamic content, e-Commerce and syndication.

The software’s name itself means “water drop” in Dutch and was based upon the content model of the original site. Since Drupal has evolved into a full scale CMS it has generated over 1 million downloads and is currently in release version 7.0. This article aims to help developers understand the origins and future of the CMS.

The evolution of modern Drupal

The early history of Drupal is marked by a University project at Antwerp to enable student communications. The project began as Drop.org and later evolved into Drupal as we know it today. When the project was released to the open source community, it began to take on an entirely new life with extended features, options and modules.

The currently Drupal release is a product of countless contributors, each of whom helped shape the project into its current form. Within a few years, not only were online contributors adding new core code, modules and templates but conferences were emerging to cater to Drupal development. One of the earliest conferences to shift attention to Drupal was Civic Space, which provided a venue for developers to come together and share ideas.

With the release of Drupal version 4 in 2004, the project began taking its modern form in the backend. A major structural change added customizable fields, menus and inputs, opening up the project to become a social and commercial engine that drives its popularity today. As the development team began laying the code for the modern version of the CMS, the software took an entirely unique approach to its structure.

Rather than focusing independently on various modules and features, it began to take shape as a modern CMS that is flexible enough for nearly any type of application. With the emergence of an improved core code, major enterprise level sites began to migrate to Drupal in 2005 with the release of version 5.0. At the same time international Drupal conferences began to formalize in North American and Europe, including DrupalCon. Impressively, Drupal began a core feature at Google’s Summer of Code, where emerging coders tackle important open source projects.

The software took on a popular MVC approach in 2005, giving it a flexible layout structure and allowing for full scale development on the top of the CMS. With an integrated structure to manage content, major private and public developers began to utilize the software to power major sites. Modern development libraries, such as jQuery, are increasingly integrated in with the software to take development to an entirely new level. With an active developer community in the thousands new features are added to the software on a regular basis, and Drupal continues to evolve along with new web standards.

Links

• Drupal.org Official Website
• Top 10 Drupal Hosting Companies

About Stephane Brault

Stephane is a web developer and system administrator with over 18 years of experience. Specialized in PHP programming and Linux server administration, he also provided development and consulting services to SMBs for several years before becoming an online entrepreneur.