What exactly is Drupal and why would a web development shop use it, and more importantly, why do you need it?
Great Question. Drupal is a mature web development framework which has a very extendible structure. This allows us to create very amazing applications and products with a secure and managable framework that you can manage the content and application in. This helps reduce time to market, and provides for a more thouroughly tested end system than a completely custom built application.
Drupal is a publishing platform created by our vibrant community and bursting with potential. Use as-is or snap in any of thousands of free designs and plug-ins for rapid site assembly. Developers love our well-documented APIs. Designers love our flexibility. Site administrators love our limitless scalability.
With more than 6000 available modules, the vast majority of your site's requirements can be addressed with Drupal core and available add-on modules. Focus your efforts on building great web sites, not re-creating features available elsewhere. You can even contribute modules for others to use.
Drupal is a CMS, but it also acts as a full featured application framework. It allows your developers full control over the backend while still providing you a unified and simple management interface for it all.
Drupal comes with great options for new user accounts and user permissions. Users can be assigned one or more roles, and each role can be set up with fine-grained permissions allowing users to view and create only what the administrator permits.
Drupal takes security seriously and uses a dedicated team that has a proven track record in dealing with your security issues professionally and efficiently, meaning you can spend more time creating your site.
The passionate Drupal community is on hand to give support via various vibrant IRC channels, in the forums, and face to face at Drupal events. The worldwide community drives the innovation that makes Drupal the preferred choice for web developers and site owners. Drupal is open source, meaning everybody can get involved and make a difference.
Drupal is open source software maintained and developed by a community of hundreds of thousands of users and developers. It's distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or "GPL"), which means anyone is free to download it, share it with others, and contribute back to the project. This open development model means that people are constantly working to make sure Drupal is a cutting-edge platform that supports the latest technologies that the Web has to offer.
Drupal makes it easy to connect your website to other sites and services across the web, using aggregation, feeds, and search engine connection capabilities. Social networking integration is also widely supported to help you engage with a wider audience. Drupal also offers your site easy ways to interact with external media and file services.
