Abstract: Migrating to Drupal
By Abhijeet Chavan and Michael Jelks
Drupal is often mentioned in discussions about blogging tools or Web-based forum software. Sure, you can run a blog or an on-line forum using Drupal, but that is only part of what Drupal can do. Drupal is better described as a framework that provides an infrastructure for on-line collaboration and communities. It can be used to run corporate Web sites, intranets, news portals and many other types of Web sites.
The Drupal Project has its roots in an internal message board system built by University of Antwerp student Dries Buytaert for his student dorm. In 2001, Dries released the software as an open-source project named Drupal (pronounced "droo-puhl"). Others started using Drupal and began contributing to the project. Drupal is built using open-source technologies: the PHP programming language and the MySQL or PostgreSQL databases. Licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), Drupal can be downloaded and used for free. As with many successful open-source projects, Drupal is maintained and developed by a thriving user and development community. Five years old in January 2006, Drupal has evolved into a robust content management platform.
Working at a Web development firm, we have successfully built many Web sites for our clients based on Drupal. In this article, we share what we have learned, and we tell the story of our most complex Drupal project to date.